


Crescendo

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Fluff, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Musical References, Mutual Pining, Romantic Gestures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 03:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 26,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10676970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: It's Insomnia's Golden Age, the height of wealth and debauchery. Beneath all its grandeur, Noctis prefers the small speak-easy down the road, with the shrewd-eyed piano player that lulls him to sleep with love ballads every night.





	1. placido

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LogicDive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LogicDive/gifts).



> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/159252352282/can-i-request-an-au-set-in-1920-noctis-a) for an anonymous request.

“Rough day at the office, kiddo?”

Noctis slanted a weak glare at him, downing a deep gulp of his drink. That was all the answer Nyx needed. He lit the cigarette between his lips and offered one to the reporter from the pack. “Smoke pairs nice with gin,” he said.

Noctis shook his head, murmuring a soft “no thanks.” He turned his face down to his glass, turning his index finger along the rim and watching the subtle undulations of the alcohol within. The sullen stare was a dramatic change from the spiteful grin he usually brought into the speak-easy.

The young heir had been coming down to their little hovel almost every evening since he’d started working for the Citadel. The newspaper publication was just a short walk up the hill from Kingsglaive. The night club had been hosting employees coming off their shifts from there for years. As was only civil between sister establishments. Mayor Caelum owned both. Just like he owned everything in Insomnia.

Including, rumor had it, his son’s employment at Citadel. Nyx still remembered the first time he’d come into Kingsglaive with his friends to celebrate. And he remembered the times after where he came in annoyed and rambling at the nearest stranger willing to lend a sympathetic ear about the judgmental scoffs of his co-workers that assumed the heir had everything bought for him and had never worked a day in his life.

Nyx had fallen into the role of sympathetic ear on the first night and hadn’t broken character since. At first, he had rolled his eyes when the reporter hadn’t been looking because yeah, he was starting to agree with the kid’s co-workers if he was this whiny about it. He sounded like the spoiled brat the rival paper was determined to make him out to be.

But nights passed, and Noct talked, and Nyx listened from above the notes of the piano. He started to hear what was playing underneath all that bluster. He heard the richness of his laugh as the knobby-kneed blond he always brought with him played tricks with the empty bottles at their table. He heard the resolve in his voice when he hadn’t touched a single drop of gin all night and told Nyx about how he was going to prove to everyone that he was so much more than his father’s son. He heard the breathless excitement as he teased him with vague details about this story he _just knew_ was “the one.”

Nyx had taken a liking to him. Had gotten used to having him around the speak-easy. He was gradually becoming as permanent a fixture in the smoky bar as the piano Nyx sat behind every night. While sometimes he came with friends, most of the times he was alone. And those were the times Nyx liked him the most. The shy glances at the pianist’s hands as they glided over the keys. How quiet he got when he was approached by strangers, how polite and nervous his smile was as he declined the offers to share a drink.

And Nyx liked the sound of his voice. As sinful as the melodies rising from the piano. He didn’t like not hearing it tonight.

“Don’t look so down, doll. You could make a man cry with those sad baby blues.”

He bumped a finger beneath Noctis’s chin as he passed his table, tucked in the corner just beside the piano. Noctis blinked in surprise at the brief contact, watching Nyx blankly for a moment.

“You alright there, kid?” Nyx chuckled, tossing his jacket onto the piano bench and rolling up his sleeves.

Noctis watched the casual movements for a moment. Nyx grinned around his cigarette and deliberately slowed, folding the cuffs to his elbows. That was another thing he liked about Noctis. He liked to watch. He was curious and observant and wandering looks like those drove Nyx crazy. There were a hundred questions behind those eyes and he wished that Noctis would just _ask them_ already.

“Do you ever think…” Noctis started, lips pressing together. “That some stories are better left untold?”

“This isn’t about your big break, is it?”

Noctis frowned, eyes falling to the table. Nyx bit down on the cigarette. He wasn’t ready for those eyes to leave him yet. Especially not to go so forlornly down into his drink. He set down at the edge of his bench, elbows on his knees and leaning over to try and catch Noctis’s eye again.

“You’ve been talking about this story for _weeks_ , Noct. You’re not just going to give up on it, are you?”

Noctis winced, easing back into his chair and taking another drink. He dropped the glass with a loud tap back onto the table. His eyes were dark and distant, looking at the mahogany beneath his hand as if it were the reason behind his strife.

“It’s just… I don’t think I like where it’s taking me.”

“Isn’t that how it is with all stories?” Nyx counseled. “You may not like the one scene you’re being brought to, but you have to trust the writer to take you past it to the happy ending. If you bail out before you get there, well, that’s just a waste of paper and printer ink, ain’t it?”

Noctis gave a small, wry smile. “Not just paper and ink on the line this time.”

Nyx cocked his head to the side. No, he didn’t like this at all. He didn’t like that melancholy sigh, those downcast eyes, the idle arm curled around his waist in an unconscious effort to comfort himself. Nyx slid to the other end of the bench and patted the open space next to him.

“Hey, how ‘bout you come take a seat behind the scenes before the rush comes in? Tell me what you think of this new piece I’ve been working on.”

Noctis blinked, bemused, eyes flitting between Nyx and the stern, perpetually constipated looking man moving chairs across the room that he knew was the manager.

“Don’t worry about the Commander,” Nyx chuckled, using the nickname all the employees had come to tease the man with. “Besides, I think exceptions can be made for the owner’s son.”

Noctis nibbled on his lip before a spark of mischief lit his eyes and he bounced to his feet, sidling next to Nyx in front of the keys.

“So, this is the view you get every night, huh?” he commented, looking out at all the tables and chairs crowded across the floor; the broad mahogany bar along the wall and the sharp brunette preparing glasses behind it; the stage at the back where specially booked bands and singers would sometimes entertain.

“Not another view like it,” Nyx agreed before nudging his shoulder into his. “Now hush up and give this a listen for me, would ya?”

“As you command, maestro,” he replied with an exaggerated sigh.

Noctis smiled at him, and the first notes inspired themselves from beneath Nyx’s fingers. It had been coming to him in bits and pieces every night that he came off his shift. He would tumble into his apartment, hands aching from the hours of constant playing, flopping face-first into his mattress and wanting nothing more than to sleep and dream about blue eyes glowing from behind cigarette smoke and night lights.

But then the music would start in his head. The lilting notes tip-toeing around his brain until he sat up and tore through the apartment for pen and paper. Until he was surrounded by pages of musical notes and had his guitar in his lap to practice the sound of it. To try and capture that solemn hopefulness, that quiet reserve swelling into something so much stronger. Into rough elegance and conviction. Strong, but soft. Bittersweet and so strangely nostalgic.

He had to get it out. He had to frame the feelings into musical bars. Had to satisfy the muse which tormented him so sweetly, leaving glances in the night well into his dreams. He glanced to the side and watched Noctis as he let his fingers make sound to words he wasn’t sure how to say. Catching the sparkle in his wide blue eyes as he listened, watching the way his lips turned down and parted as the melody crept inside of him and squeezed his heart. Nyx felt appeased. That he’d bled for his muse and he’d accepted the offering.

“That was beautiful,” Noctis whispered when Nyx allowed the last notes to flutter out into the smoke rising from occupied tables. “Too beautiful for a night club.”

Noctis laughed, ducking his head and dragging the back of his hand over his eyes. Nyx felt his own smile soften.

“Good, then it fits. ‘Cause so are you.”

Noctis hastened a glance back at him, brow creasing in confusion. “What do you mean?” he asked, as if the color on his cheeks didn’t say that he already knew.

“’Cause it’s you,” Nyx said, nodding at the piano. “Named the song ‘Noctis.’”

Noctis stared, cheeks like roses and lips collapsing apart in a voiceless shape. And Nyx felt a few more notes creeping onto the pages of his midnight musings.

“Can I take you out sometime?” he asked. “Get you away from this story for a while, maybe?”

Noctis blinked himself back from whatever cloud he’d alighted upon. Nyx watched his throat work around a lump of nerves that had formed. Watched his eyes flitter between Nyx and the hands folding over one another in his lap. It only made the answer that much sweeter to Nyx’s ears.

“Okay,” Noctis said, voice rising into a little laugh. “Yeah, sure. I’d really like that.”


	2. serenata

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they get caught in a rainstorm, and nyx invites him up to his apartment.

It had been a week or two since their first date. And a few days since their first kiss. And Noct’s head was reeling with piano notes and cigarette smoke. It was all so overwhelming. _Nyx_ was overwhelming. Noctis had never met someone so… profoundly _good_. Especially not to him.

While his father had tried to raise him as far out of the public eye as he could, Noctis still remembered the burn of flashbulbs in his eyes before he ever remembered a smile. At least, not one that wasn’t mocking him. Regis raised him in the light – in summer getaways, out of crisp and clean offices, from sunny TV broadcasts – but in that light, his shadow fell far and deep over Noctis. It was most apparent working at Citadel, where he couldn’t turn a single corner without catching the ends of a whisper about how he was given his job at the news agency. The Citadel was all forced laughter and shadow smiles.

Kingsglaive was all lost inhibitions and screams of joy. The nightclub was midnight freedom; dancing, drinks, and jazz. A retreat from the silver city overhead down into the underworld below. Smoke and shadows. No bright bulbs, making things black and white and trying to fit into one or the other. Kingsglaive was all the shades in between. It was the writing between the lines of the stories Noctis chased with his typewriter every day. It was the burnt film at the edges of the silent movies; an imperfection that somehow made the picture all the more perfect.

It was the gray of Nyx’s eyes, watching him from above the piano. It was the ease of hands over the keys, hands too rough to make such gentle music pass beneath them. It was the thrill of his smile, singling Noctis out across a crowded room, summoning him to the musician’s side to be enraptured by his playing.

He didn’t know if it was too early to think he was in love.

He didn’t know the rules for this.

But he did know that no one’s laughter had ever made his heart race so fast before. That no one’s smile had ever made the edges of his eyes feel so warm. That no one’s arm over his shoulders as they wandered along the boardwalk of Galdin had ever made the tension in his bones feel so soft.

He did know that, every time Nyx played _his_ song – the song he wrote only for Noct’s ears and only played after hours when it was just the two of them left at the bar – he felt untethered from his life in the day that he couldn’t make himself light enough to deserve. He felt so much more belonged in the _darkness_ that Nyx invited him into. Noctis wasn’t afraid of his shadows like he was afraid of his father’s.

Because Nyx didn’t cast shadows. He wielded them in hand, conducted them into his music, and shrouded Noctis with them as they walked above the evening shores. Hugged them around his waist and softened them against his lips as they kissed in the azure dark, hidden beneath the pier.

“Whatcha thinkin’ about, baby blues?”

Noctis glanced up, finding himself from where he’d gotten lost, watching Nyx’s calloused fingers glide over the strings of his guitar. It had been raining when they left Kingsglaive that night. Nyx had invited him up to his apartment while they waited for the worst of the storm to pass. It was a small space, a block down from the nightclub. A bed smashed into the furthest corner by the window leading out to the fire escape – and beyond that, the view of the gray harbor stretching out and away from Insomnia. A little kitchen across, a wall dividing it from the bathroom, a cluster of couches in the space between and a desk with an old radio set atop it.

Clothes lines wove like spider webs overhead, presently dripping with rain-drenched clothes as the storm cackled outside. Nyx sat at the edge of his bed across from Noctis, the reporter nestled in the corner of the armchair and in Nyx’s clothes while waiting for his own to dry. His shirt was as big as a blanket around his shoulders. Warm as one, too. And smelled of smoke and bourbon; coffee and cologne. He smiled at those eyes, smiling back at him; as dense as a fog, but as clear as starlight. Noctis tilted his head where he rested it in his crossed arms against the armrest.

“I was thinking about our kiss,” he answered, honesty rolling off his tongue as if drunk. “Your song reminded me of it.”

Nyx’s eyes hooded, fingers drumming idly up and down the guitar strings, filling the apartment with soft, tuneless chords. Noctis let his own eyes wander as Nyx set the instrument aside. Bare-chested with suspenders slung over his shoulders; even as far away as he was, Nyx could still make Noctis feel warm. Warmer still when he leaned that broad expanse of browned flesh closer to him.

“Don’t need a song to do the reminding, do we?” Nyx asked, a smirk deepening into his cheek.

He braced one arm on either side of Noctis, leaning against the arms of the chair and bringing a knee up against the edge of the cushion. Noctis lifted his head from his arms, hands raising to pause between them, hovering over Nyx’s naked chest. His heart skipped a beat, hesitant and excited, eyes travelling along the lines of old scars he was curious to ask about, but bit back down nevertheless. Nyx looped his fingers around Noct’s wrist, gently guiding his hand to rest against his chest, his skin hot to the touch. Like there was a bonfire crackling where his heart was beating.

“Feel free to touch,” Nyx said. “If that’s what you want.”

Noctis glanced between his hand on Nyx’s chest and the man’s eyes above him, intense and inviting and soft and a little bit sinful. Dark with a desire Noctis could feel straining through his own veins every time Nyx rolled up his sleeves to start playing the piano.

“I really want to kiss you again,” Noctis confessed, thumb turning experimentally over Nyx’s chest.

A low hum vibrated beneath Noct’s palm, raising a held breath into his own chest. Nyx pressed closer, elbows easing onto the armrests, his face drawn close enough to tickle the hairs of his stubble against Noct’s chin.

“What a coincidence,” Nyx teased, sterling stare sparking with amusement. “I really want to kiss you again, too.”

He laid his lips upon Noct’s, resting for a moment to consider the willingness underneath. Noctis willed for more, mouth slipping open and body sinking closer to the warmth radiating from Nyx’s skin. He hadn’t wanted to stop kissing him that night under the pier. He’d wanted to hold him close and wait for the tide to pull them out to sea, where they could kiss in the infinite indigo waves for an eternity. Where Nyx could sing him songs in the deep blue like the kindest siren, sinking them both into the safety of the dark at the bottom of the world.

Nyx kissed deep and long and close. In a city full of shallow socialites, too-quick steps in the rush of morning traffic, and the sterile distance between desk spaces in the office, Noctis _craved_ this kind of intimacy. He wanted a connection outside of his squares of paper and ink. He wanted to know that the fantasies in his mind’s shadows could be true. He wanted this sweet serenade of Nyx’s breath in his mouth and his arms ruffling the shirt on Noct’s back and the soft whine of the chair cushion as they shifted above it.

Noctis parted his legs for Nyx’s hips to lower between, his breath catching on Nyx’s kiss at the contact. Nyx seized his lip between his teeth under the soft gasp, a soft tug of the flesh to warn of the teasing kisses that followed against his jaw, then beneath his ear, and then down to his neck.

No one had ever kissed him _there_ before. No one had ever made his head roll back to expose his throat like a submissive animal for lips and teeth to graze over so carefully. No one had ever drawn that _noise_ past his lips before, or held a hand to the back of his neck to steady his head against such a ravishing mouth before.

 _“How do you get inspired to write your music?”_ Noctis had asked him before, when Nyx was tuning his guitar.

 _“It helps to have such a beautiful muse,”_ Nyx had said, stroking a finger beneath Noct’s chin.

Noctis could almost believe him when he kissed him like this, _touched_ him like this. Nyx’s hand brushed delicately down his chest, above the shirt that was too big for him, before landing on his hip, cupping the curve of bone and steadying himself there to lean away. Noctis whimpered to object as the kisses along his neck ceased, Nyx shaking his head as if rousing from a dream.

“You have to leave soon,” he reminded himself, voice as rough as the rain hissing against the windowpane.

Noctis looked over Nyx’s head at the storm still raging outside. He could see the rain pelting the harbor, see the skies undulating black and gray and bulging with more storm to assault the city. He thought about the questions he would get in the morning. He thought about how worried Ignis would be if he woke up tomorrow and didn’t find Noctis face-first in the couch, working off a hangover from staying too late at Kingsglaive the night before. He thought that there was a phone booth across the street, and if he woke up early enough the next morning, he could call his roommate and tell him everything was okay. And he thought that there was no way the storm would let up before dawn.

“I want to stay,” Noctis whispered, nuzzling his face against the side of his head, nose nudging the braid that was woven there. “I want to play music with you. All night.”

Nyx _growled_ into the low collar of Noct’s shirt, his grip on his hip tightening and the hand at the back of his neck tangling at the ends of his hair. Nyx lifted his face, searching Noct’s eyes. And Noctis wanted him to find him. At the edge of a film reel, in the shade between black and white, in the lines between the newsprint he didn’t know how to write.

Nyx grinned. And Noct was found.

“Music lessons it is, then.”


	3. definitions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there's a difference between sulking and pining.

“They not working you hard enough over there? Or are you caught in the throes of literary insignificance again?”

“Actually… I just miss you.”

Nyx smiled into the receiver and wished that Noctis could see it. He could hear the sadness in his voice, could see it in the vivid blue of his eyes that Nyx wrote into his music every night to substitute writing his hands into perfect, pearlescent skin. As pure and unwritten as a blank sheet of music, begging Nyx to make it sing.

It was hard to be without his muse since Noctis had descended the steps to Nyx’s underworld and bestowed upon him the inspiration he’d been chasing for years. It was hard to fall asleep each night without the hymns sung from Noct’s voice underneath him. Like catching a beat in his head and unable to let it go, Noctis was his favorite song. He missed hitting those high notes when he pulled his back to his chest and rolled up into him. He missed making his name into a melody, spilling off that pretty, pink tongue. He missed the crescendo of his voice as Nyx bit down his chest.

He missed the high notes, the staccato breaths, the allegro race of his pulse conducted from beneath Nyx’s kiss. And he missed the low notes, too; the soft cadence of “good night” at the end of their long compositions, the chorus of him laughing with his friends as he came into the bar, and the nightly encores he awaited until Kingsglaive emptied with the last dregs of gin and it was just the two of them and Nyx’s piano left to serenade the remaining evening.

“I can feel you sulking,” Nyx chuckled, slouching back in the office chair, tapping his foot against the edge of the desk to the jazz band humming down from the stage upstairs.

“I’m not sulking. I’m pining. There’s a difference.”

“If you say so. Not about to argue with an author about definitions.”

“Knew there was a reason I liked you.”

“I’m no linguist, but I think you mistranslated a word there.”

A cloud of breath warbled between them, discordant noise crackling in Nyx’s ear. His boot stilled against the desk, losing his rhythm in the dissonance of Noct’s despairing sigh.

“I didn’t want to say it over the phone,” Noctis confessed. “It’s not the same when I can’t see your face.”

“Oh, yeah?” Nyx chuckled, resuming the tap of his beat. “What exactly does my face look like when you say it to me?”

“You want my professional opinion?”

“Your honest one.”

“I’m a reporter.”

“Then stop being a reporter and be a writer for a minute.”

Noctis laughed and the music of it harmonized with the beats of him that were stuck in Nyx’s head. A few lilting chords to strum along his memory and ease the absence of him.

“You look like a night sky after storm clouds pass by,” Noctis told him, his voice like velvet to his ears. “Like there’s always been this thunder and rain that keeps you from seeing the stars, and saying it clears them from the sky. Your eyes glint like moonlight, peering past the mist that the storm leaves behind. You look like the life after the storm, not the calm before it. Like saying the words made your whole world burst open in a hundred shades of blue and gray. It’s humbling and intimidating and it makes me feel like I could never say it to anyone else but you because it would never look as perfect.”

Nyx wished that Noctis had been a novelist. There was no romanticizing or fantasizing in reporting. And newspapers always seemed to have _bad_ news on the front page. There never seemed to be a kind word permitted for any column. Just clipped, clinical lines for carrion truths.

Nyx liked the flow of Noct’s prose, purple though it could sometimes be. But Nyx wasn’t a literary analyst. He didn’t know the technicalities involved in constructing a paragraph. He knew that he liked the rhythm of the spoken word as much as he liked lyrics. He liked how Noctis could make plain, unsung sentences sound like their own song.

And he liked that Noctis sang them to him. Wrote for him and about him and made him think of himself like a stranger. Some days, Noctis wrote him as he was: a broke pianist, burning cigarettes on the piano bench and invisible in the shadows of the speak-easy. Other days, Noctis wrote him as a scoundrel: a rogue and wily pirate, shanghaiing his writer’s heart; he was an artist of colors and canvas instead of beats and rhythm, capturing the image of Noct’s love for him along his paintbrush; he was a magician or a sorcerer or a witch, casting spells with the twists of his braids to enchant Noctis past his threshold.

He was a knight.

That one was his favorite. Noctis wrote him as a knight on evenings of no special significance. He was a knight when it was just the two of them, guarded between the four walls of Nyx’s water-stained apartment. He was a knight when it was past midnight. When Insomnia didn’t quite close its eyes, but quieted to distant hums of wandering traffic, the long, black roads ferrying the lost and the free throughout the darkness.

He was a knight when he held Noctis to his side, carding fingers through ruined hair and trapping the shy slip of slender legs around his knees. Nyx was _his_ knight when he slid his arm along his back, kneaded circles along his spine, kissed bare shoulders and a pinked neck and soft lips and fluttering blue eyes. Nyx was his knight, sweeping him off his feet and rescuing him from deep, dark shadows. And Noctis was his prince. Coveted and perfect and worth swearing his honor, his life, and his love to.

“You’re beautiful,” Nyx murmured. “Wish I could make words like yours to tell you how much.”

“I wish I could have you here,” Noctis sighed. “I miss listening to you play. But I’ll be back home soon. I hope.”

Nyx swiveled in his chair to study the calendar. It was littered in throwing darts, missed from the wheel hanging above – or, in some cases, hitting their mark in a perfect bullseye. One was pinned into the date when Noctis was set to return. It still seemed so far away. And if any truth had ever been spoken about Nyx around the bar, it was that he wasn’t known for his patience.

“You know what? Stay there, I’m coming to get you.”

“What?” Noctis laughed, incredulous. “No, you’re not. You’re not coming to Altissia, it cost a fortune to get in here, Nyx. Even coming under work conditions.”

“I hear the jazz scene in that city is wild. You think the Leville has any openings? They’ve got a nice cabaret act, don’t they? I could sub in for a few days until they send you back.”

“Nyx…”

“Come on, it’ll be fun! It’s the most romantic city in the world, the effect is wasted on you if you don’t have your other half there with you.”

“It’s too much, Nyx. I’ll be back soon…”

“Soon is too long to wait to say that I lo—“

Nyx caught himself and Noctis chuckled at the abrupt groan that drummed over the words. It was such a little thing, but it would be so much bigger if he could say it to him in person. To see what Noctis saw when they let the words play between them. Let them fill each of them with words and song.

“I’m coming to Altissia.”

There was a long, fretful pause on the other end. Nyx could hear a pen clicking nervously against a wood desk-top. He could envision the gnawing of Noct’s teeth into his bottom lip, the slight crease between slim, black brows, and the shuffle of his feet beneath the desk.

“I couldn’t stop you if I tried, could I?” he finally sighed, resigned.

“You don’t want to stop me.”

“No,” Noctis agreed, his voice light with a smile that Nyx couldn’t wait to kiss again. “See you soon?”

“See you soon, baby blues.”


	4. cavatina

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Never visit Altissia when you're lonely.

Noctis felt like he’d been banging his head on his desk since the first second he’d stepped into the hotel room. The thrill of visiting the most beautiful city in the world quickly lost its charge when he had a deadline to meet before he could leave.

He’d had a day to be enamored with Altissia’s splendor – the shimmer of the seawater like spiders’ thread woven through the canals. He got off the ferry around midday and was immediately swallowed by the summery crowds like a sand castle at high tide. Being swept along the bayside avenue was exhilarating, the road cluttered with flower carts and food vendors and little street-side art exhibits. He saw artists of all trades _everywhere._ Each corner of every gilded, narrow lane had a musician or a painter or a dancer fixed to it.

The strumming of guitars, the lilting whine of accordions, the racing pat of palms against make-shift drums, the laughter, and lyrics buoyed the stream of tourists across the waterfront. It was impossible to give each performer the attention he thought they deserved in one day. Even in all the days he would spend in the city thereafter, he feared that it wouldn’t be enough to consume the expressions of every artist decorating the streets. Altissia was flowing with as much creativity as it was with saltwater.

And he was missing all of it. After that first evening of blinking streetlamps like stars from his eyes and being welcomed to the Maagho by co-workers that – not a few months earlier – had scorned him for his name alone, he’d been left to his pretty hotel room at the top of the Leville with a blank page at the desk and blanker thoughts in his head.

He drifted down to street level each morning for a continental breakfast spent people-watching and scribbling down the disjointed prose caught draining from beneath the thinning veil of sleep with each sip of his coffee. None of it was anything he could use in a newspaper article about the political temperature between Accordo and Niflheim. He really didn’t think that it had been necessary to travel across the sea and be immersed in the culture of the country’s capital to write about that.

In truth, Noctis knew that his father had arranged to have him sent out of Insomnia to get him away from his obsession with exposing the city’s underworld. It was the story that he was striving to prove himself with. It was ambitious for even the most veteran journalists at Citadel, let alone a boy that had only a handful of articles published under his lofty name.

He didn’t resent his father for the under-handed expulsion from Insomnia. No one was more loathsomely aware of his own writer’s block than Noctis was. He filled out little columns here and there between furiously trying to divulge the secrets of the city for the front page scoop he was chasing after. But with every roadblock slammed down onto his path in his hunt for the truth, he lost another page’s worth of words for everything else. Regis suggested that he “try something different,” thinking he was being subtle when he brought up a change of scenery over dinner. So, Noctis was hardly blind-sided when his boss selected him to travel with a few other reporters over to Altissia for this story. Regis thought he was clever, but everybody knew that there was no other excuse for an all-expense paid retreat to Altissia than the mayor pulling strings for the whims of his son.

Noctis really wished that Altissia had worked. He wanted to write, he wanted to be inspired by the city and let it resuscitate his dead words into something he could feel proud of. But as much as Altissia was gorgeous and he could jot down lists of descriptors that might match the grandeur of the city, he couldn’t _feel_ a single one of the words he compiled onto his breakfast napkin. He saw Altissia for all its wonders and culture and magnificence, but try as he may, he couldn’t connect to it.

He hid from the city because he was ashamed that he couldn’t feel it. That he couldn’t recapture that first sensation of disembarking from the ferry and unleash himself to it completely.

As he forced himself to sit at his desk every evening and bang his head against the wood surface with a pitiful whine, he mused that the problem with Altissia was that it wasn’t meant to be enjoyed alone. It was built to be explored together.

From the tables for two at the Maagho, to the romantic boulevards overseeing the gold-struck waters at sunset, the city was made for two. Or three. Or four. Not one. It was meant to be shared by friends and families and lovers alike. It was crafted to imprint upon memories of laughter and adventure and kisses. The salt-washed undersides of the avenues were for secret escapes under the bronzed night light. The flowers cascading out of painted window boxes and terra cotta pots were planted to be picked and sniffed, with their petals kissed beneath the chins of ticklish children. The decadent meals served deep beneath the heart of the city were tailored around exchanging stories and teasing and good conversation above the gentle click of full wine glasses.

Noctis knew he would have loved Altissia so much better if he wasn’t by himself. He missed his friends. He knew that Ignis would love it here, Prompto would get lost and be all the happier for it, Gladio would be content with a chair and a book under the umbrella of the Leville’s airy restaurant, facing the bay. He missed them when he was watching tourists dance to the street musicians and clapping for them at the back of the crowd, standing still and wishing he wasn’t. He missed them when he couldn’t finish the generous helpings of seafood on his plate by himself. He missed them when he laughed only for the sake of laughing among his colleagues when they invited him to join them, but not because whatever they said was particularly funny.

He missed Nyx the most. He missed him when he watched the gondolas float beneath the bridges, couples clustered close together in the narrow boats. He missed him when he saw arms casually slung around slim shoulders, when he saw kisses he wasn’t meant to see in the alcove alleys beneath the stairways. He missed him when he sat to watch the guitar player beg for love through the allegories of his frantic chords.

He’d said that he was coming to him in Altissia. Although Noctis knew that it was impossible for his gallant, penniless lover to afford passage from Lucis, the smallest seed of hope buried itself at the bottom-most tip of his heart that, somehow, he would make it. He’d sounded so confident that he could do it over the telephone, voice crackling with the flames of his conviction over all of that distance.

How could he be expected to write about the callous indifference of foreign politics when every time he wrote the letter “I” he couldn’t bring himself to finish it off with anything other than “love you?” Noctis craved the spoken word so much more than the written one lately. He listened more to the singers in the streets than his own inner voice.

He watched the pads of coarse fingers race along silk strings and bit down on his lip hard enough to draw him from recent memories of being strummed as tenderly as that instrument himself. His vision often glazed over when he watched the street dancers perform, pressed up against each other in perfect symmetry as they moved to each other’s secret rhythm. It was hard not to remember how the record scratched when his back bumped into the borrowed player the last time he and Nyx danced in his apartment. How the speaker creaked with silence afterwards and the old mattress picked up the beat with a springy scream in its place.

The Leville’s hotel rooms were massive, and the longer he stayed in it, the more he felt it swallowing him up. He missed the smallness of Nyx’s apartment. He missed how it cradled him as closely as Nyx held him to his body. He missed how the sound of Nyx’s guitar could soak into the walls, letting him harmonize with the chords long after their musician had traded instruments from his seat on the bed.

Noctis curled his arms over his head and puffed out a sigh into the desk, playing Nyx’s song of him in his thoughts in an effort to not miss him so badly. Pretend that he was just a room away and not an entire ocean away instead. Pretend that the melody was being crooned right into his ear. Pretend that he could feel the heat of his breath as clearly as he could hear the low mildness of his voice. It was as distant as the sea, yet so close in his head and in his heart. If he took a few steps to his window, he could hear it so much louder, coming in off of the bay breezes. He could see Nyx right there in the cobblestone streets, serenading the purple evening with his songs.

Noctis sat up abruptly, crumpled up balls of paper scattering ahead of his feet as he rushed to the open casement window. Before he thrust his head out into the briny air, he thought the isolation must have driven him mad if he thought he might look out onto the street and see Nyx standing there.

But there he is. Not a phantom of a wailing writer’s mania. Not a smoky memory that wreathes his heart like a gentle fog. There he is, fingers fanning the strings of his old guitar, grinning up at him from the golden wreath of the streetlamp just below his hotel window, lips forming “bops” and “doo wops” in place of lyrics he didn’t yet know how to write. He swept his arm down the final chord and let it ring across the waterfront, raising his arm to his hat and waving it up at Noctis like a lone seafarer coming into port.

Noctis applauded his song like he did at the end of every set at Kingsglaive, the edges of his eyes stinging with how happy he was to see him. Nyx swept his hat to his chest and gave an exaggerated bow.

“Thank you, thank you! Applause are appreciated, but I’d much prefer praise in the form of a kiss.”

“Then you’d better get up here,” Noctis called down to him, feeling himself pushing beneath his skin, ready to leap out the window and into his arms.

“I don’t know. The clerk is looking at me like I’m crazy.” Nyx turned his gaze down to the open first floor of the Leville, his smirk twisting devilishly for the receptionist staring out at him from the front desk. “Besides, I came across an ocean for you! Think you could meet me the last couple of steps?”

Noctis shoved his feet into his shoes and threw on his jacket, barely having enough patience to lock the hotel room behind him before he was pounding down the crimson carpets over the stairs. He didn’t give the receptionist a second glance, eyes pinioned into Nyx across the threshold. Nyx slung the guitar over his back just before opening his arms to catch Noctis in a spin.

Noctis collided with him, arms thrown around his broad shoulders and clinging to his warm chest. The sea air was so damp and cold without Nyx to chase it from his bones. His thoughts so stagnant without the scent of Nyx to fire through his synapses: cigarette smoke and piano varnish; sandalwood and exotic spices. He clutched the old gray wool of Nyx’s long, worn ulster, buried his face beneath his scruffy chin and into the hollow of his neck. Nyx rocked them in a circle beneath the halo of the streetlamp, discordant notes from his guitar striking out when the motion bumped it against his back.

“I missed you so much, baby blues,” Nyx mumbled into his hair, the rasp of his voice muffled against Noct’s skin.

“I love you.”

Saying it opened the floodgates to all the words that had congested into a mass without form in the front of his head. Noctis craned his head back to watch Nyx’s face transform with all of his favorite details as he said it. Stormy gray clouds parting to let the blue bleed through, steeping his face in the soft evening hues. Softening the strong edges with the curve of his crooked smile. He could never do this face justice on paper, Noctis thought. It was too perfect for words. Did too many nameless things to the part of him that no one else could touch but Nyx, deep, _deep_ past his skin and his bones.

“How did you get here?” Noctis asked, breathless with the relief of having him in his arms again.

“I know a guy… who knows a guy, who knows a guy that might be on the run from the law. Stupidly, that’s how I got here. But not stupid enough to get into trouble, promise.”

“Better not. I don’t want to share your trouble with the authorities.”

“Or with the city?” Nyx grinned, dragging his gaze away from Noctis to look at all the twinkling lights just across the bridge from the Leville. “Am I going to get into too much trouble to get you to give me the grand tour?”

Noctis snorted and rolled his eyes, reluctantly taking enough of a step back to extend his hand for Nyx to take. “You’d better hold my hand. You can’t do anything stupid if I’ve got a good grip on you.”

Nyx took it without hesitation, Noctis ready to lead him along the boulevard. Nyx made a scolding sound, clicking his tongue against the inside of his teeth before tugging on his arm and drawing Noctis back into his chest. His lips crashed against Noct’s, hands bound together between them and an arm around his lower back, bending Noctis back over it with how deeply Nyx pressed into him. Lapping up every word that Noctis didn’t know how to write for him. He kissed him for so long that he couldn’t breathe. That he gasped when Nyx pulled away, but still wanted more, mouthing at Nyx’s lips and begging him to sing into him with his kiss alone.

“Sure there are more romantic spots for that around here, right?” Nyx asked, laughing low and husky and just as yearning for Noctis as he was for him.

Noctis grinned, stealing a smaller kiss, a promising tease of a kiss, before drawing his musician into the city that he was so desperate to love. As desperately as he loved him.


	5. writer's block

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m prescribing emergency medication for a severe case of snuggle deprivation.”

“If it’s driving you that crazy, then get away from it for a while.”

“I’ve kept away from it for too long of a while already,” Noctis groaned, balling up the pages of chicken scratched failures and jamming them against his forehead. As if he could stuff them right into his brain and print the forms he could _see_ but just couldn’t _say_.

Nyx had been a miracle cure for his despondency with Altissia, but there was nothing the musician could do to make foreign politics read any less poetically than an office print-out. He’d finally narrowed down exactly what his problem was, but he had no idea how to remedy it. The problem with politics was that they required _restraint._ His prose was too flowery for the clinical correctness of a political report, his own passions too prevalent to keep himself from biasing himself to one side over another. He really didn’t care for politics, one way or another, but the more he had to force himself to sit and think about it, the more apparent his personal leanings became. He’d always wanted to be a fair journalist and an honest one… He was quickly beginning to learn that a journalist had to be one or the other. Never both.

“I’m never finishing this,” he groaned again. “I should have never taken this trip. I should have never agreed to cover this story.”

“Then don’t.”

Nyx had been serenading his artistic constipation from the hotel bed, plucking ginger notes from his guitar while he idled away on some new compositions inspired by the city. Noctis glared at him, envious and admiring. The only law Nyx followed was the measure of his music, abiding by the bars and making his own rhythm to fill them. The formula was free for him to interpret at his will. He was beholden to no academic constructs or sterilized vernacular or the crippling anxiety of unachieved expectation.

His thoughts must have been louder than he’d meant them to be. The chord of Nyx’s guitar dimmed with the waning sunlight, honeying the marble boulevards and swirling like molten gold throughout the canals. Nyx glanced up at his forlorn sprawl across the desk, fingers drumming against the mirror shine of his guitar. All Noctis wanted to write about was the color of his eyes in the lamplight, the sound his own heart made when Nyx smiled at the street performers, the warm way his palm felt in his hand.

The problem with this article was that it had none of Noct’s heart. He just didn’t _care._ And he knew his father would be disappointed and his colleagues would snicker and sneer about how he failed to deliver on the expense of this trip, and that he owed the Citadel a decent read for the opportunities it presented for him…

“Noct, I can see you turning yourself into knots right before my eyes. Give yourself a break.”

Noctis huffed against the blank pages, burying his face in his arms. Maybe he could just suffocate himself and spare himself the migraine and the mortification of failure. If not for Nyx’s insistence that he continue breathing, he just might have attempted it.

He listened to his musician set the guitar aside with a hollow thump and rise from the bed with a hiss of the expensive sheets. Despite Noct’s grunt of protest, fingers smoothed along the juts of his shoulder-blades, dipping into the deep crevice they made along his spine and sliding up beneath the folded collar of his shirt. Thumbs tender with the press of guitar strings kneaded into the back of his neck. Lips rushed against the shell of his ear, whisking down to settle a warm kiss at the delicate tug of skin where lobe melded to jaw.

“Don’t comfort me when I’m in the middle of a creative crisis,” Noctis grumbled.

“Why the hell not?” Nyx laughed in disbelief.

“You’re reinforcing bad behavior.”

“I’m prescribing emergency medication for a severe case of snuggle deprivation.”

Noctis snorted, pushing his face deeper into the cage of his arms so Nyx couldn’t see the smile he was already coaxing back onto his face. Sometimes Noctis feared that he allowed the man to have too much of an effect on him. That he’d surrendered so much of himself to his kiss that he’d lost any control he may have ever had over himself.

 _Who cares?_ A long, shudder of a sigh said for him as Nyx’s kiss snuck lower against his neck, chapped and cracked lips smoothing and warming the longer they pushed and teased against the skin of his throat. Hands smoothed flat down the front of Noct’s shirt, fondling the buttons and teasing the top few from their holes just to slip a hand against his skin and press over his twisted up heart where all of the words were trapped inside.

Nyx made a grave sound against his neck, the bristles of his beard tickling the crook of his shoulder. “This is more serious than I thought. I’ll have to issue full medical leave from your desk. And a holistic sabbatical to a more qualified establishment. Maybe down to the Maagho? Red wine’s good for the heart. Or maybe just over here to the convenience of this bed? I can prescribe plenty of healthy activities to do in that location.”

“You’re awful,” Noctis whined.

“I’m helping!”

“If you were helping, this would be written already.”

Nyx pushed closer, bent over the back of Noct’s chair and chasing the length of his neck and his jaw with kisses until he was urgently nudging against his face to turn his mouth up towards him. Noctis whined and resisted and tried to hide from it, but Nyx was insatiable and making him laugh with the tickle of his hair against his cheek and he couldn’t hold out anymore. Noctis twisted his face up and Nyx caught his lips in a kiss. His mouth curved victoriously against his.

“Bed?” he tempted him, the hand in his shirt slowly sliding down his chest.

Noctis bit his lip and Nyx kissed him again, harder, insisting with every clasp of his lips that he let him save him from the torrid tenor of his discordant prose. Noctis tried to speak and it took some churning and gentle shoving to find enough space against to make a sound.

“Dinner,” he gasped when he managed to escape the onslaught of Nyx’s affection. “That sounds good.”

Nyx cried out like a struck puppy, pouting like one, too. Noctis chuckled. “You offered.”

“Fine, if _that’s_ what’ll help,” he groaned with exaggerated drama fit for any playwright.

Noctis had to have _some_ control over himself. Otherwise, he’d never get anything done. Denying Nyx his prescriptions came with their own remedies, too. Nothing lifted his spirits quite like the comical collapse of the guitarist’s face or the plaintive rub of his head against his shoulder to persuade him towards the alternative.

“Maagho first,” Noctis sighed, twisting his fingers into Nyx’s hair in consolation. “Then bed.”

The words would have to wait just a little bit longer. Because Nyx certainly couldn’t.


	6. out of tune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noctis doesn't like romance movies anymore. Not when he has the real thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for day four of the [deathbyfluff october challenge](https://nyxnoctocalypse.tumblr.com/post/165381753552/fluffpocalypse-october-2017-prepare-to-die) and for #24 of [this fall prompt list](http://dresupi.tumblr.com/post/165250120349/fallautumn-writing-prompts-for-your-otp)

The movies liked to demonize summer romances. They liked to build up the on-screen chemistry of the leading actors, film them kissing along blinding beaches or beneath the manufactured shading of a painted night sky. They liked to make Noctis believe in love, root for the characters, and then tear them apart once the fake snow started falling. They liked to make the leading lady, so warm and frivolous in her summer dresses, into a hysterical, conceited girl that wanted all that she couldn’t have. And the leading man that had been so tender and unguarded with his jacket slung over his shoulder as they walked along the tide in the first act, was suddenly cold and callous, and walked off screen with a slam of a door instead of a farewell kiss.

He hated romance pictures. Especially after he let himself be stupid enough to fear that they could be true. If the summer he’d spent spinning in Nyx’s arms beneath the piers of Insomnia and along the waterfronts of Altissia was only the first act, then did that mean they were destined to enter this terrible, tumultuous tide of dissatisfaction with one another once the leaves started to fall? Were they following the same inevitable trope of having it too good for too long? Were they just a summer fling? Had he just been drunk on gin and jazz, and once the autumn chill sobered him up, he’d realize he had only said he loved Nyx because he was too intoxicated by him to know any better?

“Catch!”

Noctis snapped up from his thoughts like he was dragged from underwater. He had just enough time to react and throw his hands out to the short toss of an apple his way. Nyx smiled at him from across the crate.

“Scared me there for a second. Thought I was going to hurt you.”

Noctis forced himself to smile back. Right then, it was so easy to think that Nyx never would. Even when he was just playing, he was so careful, giving the apple a light and easy throw to land gently in his hands or safely back into the pile between them. He was so considerate and kind, and if he was ever going to hurt him, it would only be by the absence of that kindness. It would only be by leaving him to think back on his memories of him with more bitterness than sweetness, aching for the nights they shared in Altissia and the dancing they did at Kingsglaive. He would only hurt him in the sound of his music, racing up from the not-so-secret speak-easy without inviting him in to applaud.

“Noct?”

He wouldn’t do this. Not there. Not when they were finally back home, not when he could still taste the briny air of Altissia on his lips and the smoke of Nyx’s cigarettes on his tongue. Not when he had all this freedom after finishing the Accordo story and leaving the burden of it to the printers at long last. Not when he felt light and creative and still so in love that he could be afraid of losing it. Not when Nyx still looked at him so soft and warm with unconcealed worry.

“How many do you need?”

Noctis picked through the crate for the ripest specimens, avoiding Nyx’s stare and hating the way his stomach turned as he did. It wasn’t a day for having doubts, he told himself. It was a day for their leisure, just the two of them, back from Altissia and still with a few days off from work to spare. Noct’s pesky writer’s block was vanquished, there would be a new article in the paper tomorrow; the first tendrils of fall were weaving throughout Insomnia, and with them came the farmers and their market stalls from the countryside of Lucis.

Nyx liked to cook when he wasn’t writing music. It was his hobby where music was his necessity. Of course, he had to eat to survive, but he cooked, _really cooked_ , for his own pleasure, not because he would die if he didn’t. He cooked when he couldn’t write music. He said that he could find the notes he was missing for his next piece in the simmer. The noise of the kitchen helped clear his head for fresh melodies, gave him a different rhythm to focus on than the beats he couldn’t quite catch.

Nyx had made food for Noctis on a few occasions – breakfast, mostly – but he never _cooked_ for him. Noctis didn’t really understand the difference, but Nyx was adamant that there was one. And since the finding out the farmer’s market had opened while he’d been over-seas, he was determined to raid it for a special “welcome back feast.”

Noctis had never visited the market in all the years it had been opening in the city. Ignis did most of the cooking at home, and any time Noctis was tasked with filling up the icebox, it was from the nearest commercial grocer. But going to the farmer’s market with Nyx was like visiting an amusement park. His eyes shined as bright as flash bulbs and Noctis could feel his anticipation in the way he squeezed his hand as they wove through the stalls.

It was a simple little spot, secreted away behind the alleys and cornerstones of Insomnian industry. Despite its seclude location, people seemed to have no trouble finding it. The narrow lanes between stalls were packed with paying customers, hats and scarves pulled against the nip of the changing air. Noctis didn’t know anything about farming or crops or anything, but the stalls were already bursting with fresh harvests. Apples were set out by crates and barrels. Pears shone sweetly in the sunlight. Burlap sacks of beans and grains were opened for scoops to dive into and take bags full of the needed amount. There were late summer peppers, red and waxy, hanging around the bars of the tents. There were wreathes of garlic, trays of mushrooms, jars of honey and jams and all different sorts of preserves and pickles.

He didn’t know why watching Nyx haggle with the sellers and smile as he inspected his selections made his heart twinge with the anxiety of losing him. He didn’t know why likening the color of his skin to the dark amber honey made him feel so nostalgic for him, as if he’d lost him already and was watching him from afar. Maybe it was just the blues of coming back from the most romantic city in the world, where their affections for one another was free from any scrutiny. Maybe it was just that his brain finally had all this room to think without the Accordon story plaguing him that it ran too far down the road of his fantasy life with Nyx.

“You’re breaking my heart, ya’know.”

Noctis shook his head and cursed himself for getting so distracted. He looked back up at Nyx, hugging a bag full of fall produce to his chest, as if that would protect him from the man’s knowing stare. It was as sharp as a silver bullet, piercing straight through his heart to spill out everything he kept hidden there. Nyx considered the paper price-tag looped around the lid of the honey jar.

“It’s all over your face, whatever it is. I can see it in your eyes, Noct. What’s got you down?”

He looked at him after nodding to the salesman, his stare as open and unyielding as the sea. It was hard not to dive out into it. Nyx exchanged dollars and smiles with the salesman before claiming his purchase. His arm slipped in around Noctis, fingers cupped around his shoulder to guide him out of the way of the milling crowds. Nyx had a talent for finding quiet corners in even the loudest venues. He huddled them both in a little nook between the cheesemonger and the cabbage cart, and pinned Noctis in place with his eyes alone.

“Talk to me, Noct. What happened? Tired? Want to go home? I know you hate crowds. It’s fine if you want to go, I think we have everything…”

Noctis shook his head, surprising himself when he felt a smile crease across his own lips without him having to make it. He could see some of the tension in Nyx’s shoulders leach out as he did. He cared about him. Sometimes he forgot just how much Nyx returned his feelings for him. The big things were easy to be so infatuated with that they might blind him to faults that could drive them apart. The love songs, the romantic getaways, the love-making, the poetry Noctis could fill books with… He loved all of that. He loved the reckless abandon with which he loved Nyx. He loved the sultry wildness of their summer together.

But the mild things, the cooler, comforting notes washed over his heart in a caress. They weren’t as intense, but they were just as precious. The fact that he remembered that he hated crowds. The fact that he would drop everything for him if he thought he was overwhelmed or uncomfortable, the fact that he was so earnest in his concern for Noctis, that he could always tell if something was wrong…

They didn’t show those parts in the movies. There was so little subtlety on the silver screen. The camera showed only the broad strokes, the black and white, the good and the bad. It didn’t show the little things like this. The way Nyx’s brow wrinkled when he was concerned. The way his shoulders locked up to defend Noct from even the things he couldn’t see. The way his thumb circled his arm in soothing presses to coax him into telling him his woes.

“Just… thinking too hard, I guess.” Noctis breathed out all of his fear, letting it vanish into the silvery-gray fog of Nyx’s eyes. “It’s nothing. I’m looking forward to dinner.”

Nyx held his gaze, skeptical and still scared for him if he has to be. But Noctis leaned up to kiss him, careful and chaste. And he sighed in relief as Nyx’s arm looped around his back, protecting him from everything. Maybe it was just the winter doldrums infecting his thoughts. Maybe he just watched too many movies. He had Nyx, doing stupidly domestic things like picking out fruit at a farmers’ market. It was a little thing, but it was everything.

“Careful,” Noctis laughed when Nyx nudged a little closer. “Don’t want to bruise these.”

He held up the bag of apples in his arms and Nyx looked at him with such tender affection that he could have cried all over them.

“No, wouldn’t want to do that at all.”


	7. chorus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New Year's Eve comes in singing.

“What do you think Altissia looks like this time of year?”

“Honestly? Probably as sludgy as Insomnia looks right now.”

“I somehow doubt that,” Noctis laughed. He got the impression that whoever was in charge of beautifying the city really had to _try_ to make it look ugly.

Insomnia looked as gray as it ever did, come winter. The thick web of streets was frosted in deep, vanilla mounds of snow, hills of it piled along the edges of the sidewalks and climbing high up the lampposts. It was stained gray with the salt and the smudges of gods knew what from the ploughed roads. The city never stood still long enough for any snowfall to stay pristine. Noctis knew very well what a grievance it was for local traffic, but a more innocent part of him – the little part that never grew up and he kept between the lines of the stories he wanted to tell – longed for one morning where he could wake up and see an untouched snow.

He hadn’t seen the virgin hills of winter since he was a child, and his father would take him out into the country for the holidays to get away from the politics of his office. He remembered building snow forts with Gladio and Iris while Clarus and Regis prepared warm snacks in the cabin just up the walkway. He remembered thinking that the snow was ice cream because it looked so soft and smooth outside his window. While the ice wasn’t nearly as sweet on his tongue when he tried it, the memory of it was far sweeter.

He’d worked through the holidays this year. There were last minute stories he’d volunteered to edit and clean up for colleagues that didn’t have the time to finish the final touches before going out of town. There was still coverage of his own stories that he needed to finish before the New Year, and his boss wanted someone to take care of the weather report because there was a big snowstorm blowing in the night before the Feast of Stars.

It wasn’t how he’d thought he’d be spending the holidays, but he couldn’t complain. He’d wanted this job and he wanted to prove that he deserved it. His friend often reminded him that he’d more than proved himself with the work he’d done so far. Ignis often worried that he was letting himself be taken advantage of. Whether or not that was true didn’t change that he was grateful for the _quiet_ come Startide. As much as he loved his father and missed him this time of year, their annual holiday party had grown a little too chaotic and insincere for Noct’s tastes. They were filled with political “allies” rather than real family, catered to instead of cooked for, and had more camera coverage than he felt was in the spirit of the season.

Prompto stopped by to visit him when he was holed up in the office. They messed around with the telephones to talk with Gladio and Iggy and wish them a hearty feast, too. And later, when he was finished, and he hugged Prompto enough for all three of his best friends, he went home to find Nyx off the clock and decorating the apartment in toxic weeds just to have a traditional excuse to kiss him. As if he needed one.

Altissia would have been iced-over under the first frost, but he thought that it might be beautiful. More silver than gray, the canals gilded as mercury glass with fashionably warm vendors peddling hot drinks in the plazas. He imagined the soft golden glow of closed restaurants with their chalk signs inviting the cold and weary inside for libation to thaw the soul. He imagined icicles spiraling like frozen flowers from the residents’ window boxes.

“I’ll take you back there one day,” Nyx promised, nudging his shoulder to draw him back from his fantasized meandering. “Just for the hell of it. No working this time. For now, it’s almost midnight. You ready to head back in?”

Noctis took one last gulp of the old year, the tang of the winter winds stinging his tongue. He adjusted the paper hat of silver and gold foil on his head and took Nyx’s hand. “Ready when you are.”

Insomnia was quiet outside, muted with the final flurries of snowfall, its people cluttered inside or so far down into the heart of the city that he couldn’t hear them, waiting to blast confetti and waving lights at midnight.

Kingsglaive was resplendent in silver and gold. It was filled to bursting with all of the bar’s regulars, wearing golden garland around their necks and trumpeting silver swirled blowers. Paper hats tottered on every head, skirts shimmered and jackets slicked through the crowd, bouncing to the excited roar of the jazz band on the stage. Crowe and Libertus and Pelna and everyone on staff was loosing gin into glasses, flourishing cocktails down the bar, bumping hips and swinging to the beat to the applause of all the revelers. Gladio and Prompto were somewhere in the throng of people dancing, and Ignis he wouldn’t be half surprised if he was helping to supervise keeping the shelves stocked.

Nyx held on fast to Noctis, tucking him beneath his arm and guiding them along the melody through the crowd. Smoke and perfume and sweat and alcohol was a thick scent in the air, the cymbals and the saxophones blaring in his ears.

This was the kind of chaos that Noctis didn’t mind. It was an honest sort of disarray, the speak-easy full of smiling faces and singers and lovers dancing close, ankles tangling to the pulse of jazz. Nyx blended through the discord as calm as still water, the maestro of the madness, the rhythm in his hips as he wove them both through the crowd. The piano was the safest space, an ebony steed waiting for its rider to return. There were silver streamers thrown haphazardly across the edges, forgotten glasses of champagne decorating the top. Nyx managed to catch Crowe’s eye across the frantic crowd to call over two fresh glasses.

After she’d successfully reached them, Nyx meeting her halfway so she could hurry back to who she wanted to be with when the clock struck twelve, the countdown started. The band quieted and the dancers stilled, and everyone turned to face the big white clock set over the stage. The whole bar boomed with the voices of a hundred people, ready to step into the future together.

“ _Five… four… three… two… one!_ ”

The crowd cheered as the hands of the clock hit twelve. Silver hats flew up into the air and golden clouds of popped confetti cascaded over the crowd.

Nyx sat down on the piano bench, dragging Noctis into his lap, and kissed him hard and deep. Between the glitter in the air and the fervor of his lips on him, Noctis thought he saw stars, silver and gold, bursting behind his eyes. He tasted half a year of heaven on his lips, smoke and whiskey and unsung lyrics on Nyx’s tongue. He saw that wicked flash of silver in his eyes when he pulled away and left Noctis breathless like he always did.

He perched against his hip and hummed in languorous contentment as Nyx started to play. Something traditional, slow and steady and full of promise for the days to come. The crowd buzzed with discordant lyrics and off-tune humming in time with the melody, but no one cared about correctness down in Kingsglaive. People slung arms around each other, kissed strangers if they wanted to kiss someone, clicked glasses, caught confetti in their champagne, and made the night last forever if they could.

Noctis looped his arms around Nyx’s neck and settled his face into the crook of his neck, feeling the way his arm moved over the keys where it was reaching around his back. The melody thrummed from Nyx’s throat beneath his cheek, as warm as a heartbeat. He’d take him back to Altissia with him this year. He’d write that story, the big one, and then he’d write fairytales, he thought. He’d write about ice cream castles in the snow, about merfolk singing in the ocean, even about the secret, dark place of laughter and love underneath a glimmering kingdom. He’d help Nyx write love songs, have him play the one he wrote just for him every night.

“It’s going to be a good year,” he murmured beneath the chorus of cheers and lifting jazz.

“You’re damn right, baby blues.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also read on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/169520050677/yeah-i-have-too-1920s-au-winter-prompt)


	8. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New Year's Eve was so romantic. The aftermath, not so much.

They had wanted more than anything to bring in the New Year _right._

While Noctis wasn’t a superstitious man, even he was finding it difficult to believe that there wasn’t some ominous force of mischief at work when he fell ill during the first week. Nyx, on the other hand, was very superstitious, and his claims of supernatural foul play were immediate.

“Just our bad luck, huh?” he sighed, pressing a hand to Noct’s forehead – it didn’t feel any cooler than his fever. “Must have stepped on one too many cracks.”

“My back is fine. And that’s not a thing.”

“That’s why you’re sick and I’m not. I’m a believer.”

“You’re a bullshitter.”

Though a cute one – if not sometimes a slightly delusional one. Besides, he wasn’t even _that_ sick. It was just a head-cold, just his own fault for standing out too long in the snow on New Year’s Eve. Nyx hadn’t even noticed he was sick the first day – to be honest, Noctis still wasn’t sure himself at that point.

He thought that he’d been doing a wonderful job of keeping the coughing as close to his clogged chest as he could. But as the days progressed, it was harder to hide the running nose and the reddened eyes and the overwhelming look of misery and contempt wilting his features.

“This is just karma,” Noctis stated, glaring at Nyx’s ceiling as if it encompassed the entire universe. “For one too many glasses of gin and all the other sins you have me committing. If anyone’s bad luck, it’s you.”

“I never hear you having any objections about those sins.”

He was starting to miss those sins. He couldn’t even _think_ of seduction past the snot gagging his throat, let alone enact any such acts to try and feel better about how gross he must look. He didn’t think that he was vain, but he knew that he didn’t make the most attractive of pictures for the man that oozed sex appeal even if you shoved him down a charcoal chimney and he came out black with soot.

“You’ve ruined me for any heavenly virtues,” Noctis mumbled.

“This should get you back into the graces of the gods.”

Noctis had been watching Nyx fiddle at his stove, making the most of his small space and navigating as expertly as any instrument he played in the club. Noctis couldn’t smell what he was making, but the ingredients he did see going into the pot looked as pretty as Nyx’s songs sounded.

“Soup and a song, how does that sound?”

Nyx brought a steaming bowl of daggerquill soup and his guitar over to the bed, sinking down into the crook where the mattress met the wall. Noctis scuttled beneath the blanket Nyx had bundled him up in to make room, gratefully taking the bowl to curl fingers of fragrant steam beneath his nose.

“That’s my grandma’s secret recipe,” Nyx told him, burrowing in close and settling the guitar over both their laps. “Made my ma bring it with her when she brought us to the city.”

“And you didn’t grow up to be a soup chef? For shame.”

“You’ll change your tune once you take a sip of that.”

Whether or not the musical pun was intentional or not, Noctis rolled his eyes at him. Nyx busied himself with tuning the guitar, a crook of a smirk barely suppressed on his face. True to his word though, the flavors of the soup cut straight through the mucus, hot with some secret and sacred Galahdian pepper from Nyx’s homeland. It was a warm relief in the drafty loft, and a much tastier accompaniment than the awfulness Noctis had been swallowing the past few days.

Nyx tested his guitar with a few strums, then cleared his throat to start singing. He got a couple notes through before needing to clear his throat again, coughing to dislodge whatever was plaguing his vocal chords. Noctis’s eyes narrowed with immediate suspicion when that one cough turned into two coughs turned into three.

“You little bullshitter, you’re sick, too!”

“I do _not_ get sick!” Nyx defended himself, pushing a fist to his lips to mute the coughing fit.

“How long have you had it? Did you catch it from me?”

“I’m not sick.”

“I’m starting to get sick of you lying.”

Nyx glared at him, the redness in his eyes suddenly interpreting to Noct’s brain what it really was. His head had been so stuffed and his eyes so itchy that he hadn’t really noticed how odd some of Nyx’s mannerisms had been the fast few days. He wasn’t quite as coordinated as he was used to, catching himself on walls and tripping over his own feet and rubbing at his eyes as if he couldn’t get them clear.

“I had to take care of you,” Nyx mumbled when Noct’s glare did not abate.

“I have to take care of you.”

Noctis made to get up, and Nyx made to stop him, but they both seized up with a simultaneous sneeze and flopped back into bed. Neither of them were going anywhere to take care of anyone. Noctis huffed out a sigh, glanced at Nyx, and curled back under the blanket, extending one end to wrap around Nyx.

“Guess we’ll just have to be miserable together.”

“I can think of worse ways to be miserable,” Nyx sighed, bundling up close to share the bowl of soup and all the warmth Noct could offer.

“Let’s just hope you don’t get sick of me by the end of this.”

Nyx snorted – an ungraceful, wet, and disgusting sound that made him cringe at himself. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head to pretend at clearing his head before groaning low in his throat and settling for resting his head on Noct’s. It was too heavy to hold up himself anymore.

“I could never get sick of you, baby blues.”


	9. dissonance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It can't be pretty songs all the time. And it doesn't always have to be a bad thing.

He wanted to blame it on cabin fever.

It was the easiest excuse, and one he knew could be more easily forgiven – it wasn’t as if that seasonal hysteria was selective with its sufferers. Winters in Insomnia were long and hard and bitter and bleak. Being in love with a summer-sweet romantic didn’t thaw those cold northern winds. Every year, the same chill still bit into his apartment. Every year, the same cruel punch of the draft, icing up his windows and reminding him of all he couldn’t afford to assuage it. Not for himself, and certainly not for Noct.

It didn’t use to bother him. He bought what he could afford on pianist payments and he was content with that. It wasn’t like he was destitute. He was grateful not to be living out of a cardboard box – as if the Commander would ever let him raise his head that far above humility not to be – and he could make do with what he had well enough not to complain. No one could ever say Nyx wasn’t adaptable – kinda came with the territory, being a one-man band and all.

But while winter had brought much of the same as it did every year – the same snow, the same blustering gray skies, and the same doldrums of extended isolation – it came with one warm difference.

He’d never been in love before.

He’d loved, of course. He’d been headstrong and impulsive back home, charming his way through school and enacting teenage fantasies on the weekends. He’d been young and starry-eyed for a time when his mother moved them to the city, tuning that charm to the strings of his guitar to entice potential paramours. Then, he was cynical for a few years, older and harder – and he hoped a little wiser – than in his arrogant youth. He grew complacent with the company of strangers on the nights where solitude didn’t satisfy him.

He’d had lovers that were true to the name. He had people who he would never forget, secrets he would never tell, promises of the heart he would never break, but could never go back to.

But he’d never been in love with anything more than he’d been in love with music. Not until Noctis.

Which was why the firm click of the door stung so hard. One sharp, errant note in their perfect score. One cut off lyric in their beautiful duet.

The argument blindsided him. It tumbled out of his control so quickly. An off-pitch mess of the most awful sounds. An ugly cacophony where their sweet symphony should be. He didn’t like this tune. He couldn’t pick up the beat, no matter how hard he tried to follow the rhythm. Nyx never had been any good at words. And he couldn’t sing his way out of this one.

Noctis didn’t shout. Shouting was for men who didn’t know how to give meaning to a single word they said. Noctis crafted debate within the subtleties of vocabulary, all the finesse of a fast-acting poison dripping into Nyx’s ears.

It started with the peppers. The hot peppers from home for a warm winter’s soup designed to clear heads, not cool them down so far that they frosted up with indifference. But it was never about the peppers. It seldom ever was. It was always the thing one least expected to be the last bit of weight that made the bough break.

_“I don’t know anything about you,”_ Noctis had said. And Nyx hadn’t understood him, not then and not now that he was flopped back in bed, staring at the ceiling, and listening to his heart panic in his ears.

The hell did he mean by that? He knew all of him! Noctis knew him in ways he didn’t even know himself. He saw more in his eyes than Nyx ever did looking into them when they stared back from the mirror, confounded and astounded by whatever poetry Noctis had romanced them with. He wrote stories into Nyx’s flesh and cast him into roles he knew he didn’t deserve – soldier, knight; _hero_ – and Noctis would tell him every reason why he was good enough to be the man he read him as.

How could he say that he didn’t know anything about him? He knew the best of him; why did he need to know the worst, too?

He didn’t want to talk about home. He didn’t want to talk about who he was before Kingsglaive, the things that he did, the people he hurt. There were reasons some of those old flames never stayed lit. He didn’t want Noctis to be the next one he snuffed out.

And yet, here he was. Alone in an apartment quickly growing cold without his flame to warm the space beside him. He hadn’t even let his demons out to smother him. Merely the breath behind the cage had managed to blow out Noct’s light.

His fingers felt frostbitten every time he tried to play his guitar, each note a harsh echo of the door closing behind Noctis when he left. Those wayward notes soon turned into a dirge, keening through the apartment and following him down to the piano when he had to go to work. His sad songs and heavy tempos might have gotten him an earful from the Commander after hours, but the faulted melodies gave him as much clarity that night as they did condemnation.

Not every successful song was a happy one. Some of the greatest compositions in history were the ones that made him want to burst into tears or beat his fists against the table in time with the ire raging beneath the old classics. As much as he loved his harmonies with Noct, airy and unafraid and light as birdsong as they were, he knew that there was more to music than just the jazz numbers. Some of his favorite artists sang the blues. And there had to be more to him than just pretty chords for Noctis to really know his music.

It had taken him a day to come to that conclusion, and when he did, he snapped up and out of bed and raced out into the world, ready to sing whatever out of tune and awful lyrics to his life that Noctis wanted to hear.

Nyx hurried down the rickety old steps of his building to the lobby, not sure where he was going to find Noctis that time of night and not really caring. He’d scour the whole damn city for him if he had to. He was fully prepared to brave the frigid night like the chivalrous rogue he was in Noct’s fairytales, never expecting that Noctis himself would beat him to the gallantry.

He appeared within Nyx’s reflection, on the other side of the glass door. Their hands clasped the ruddy bronze bar to open it at the same time, and froze like a pair of anak calves in headlights at the same time, too. A mirror image of fear and surprise – although, if anyone asked Nyx, his reflection paled beside the brilliance of those blue eyes.

He could see snow and stars in them, so cold and shivering with anxiety, yet so bright and wide and full of hope that he hadn’t locked that door when he shut it behind him. Even if it was, Nyx would have shattered that glass between them just to let him back in.

“Hey there, baby blues…”

He’d been holding his breath, he realized. The words tumbled out on one long rush of breath. Like a record scratching, every deep, dark composition he’d thought to recite for Noctis cut itself short, and all he wanted was to forget that he’d ever asked for anything more than a sweet melody.

But the reminder was there in the sound of Noct’s voice. A quiet and nervous and so sad, “Hi.”

He avoided Nyx’s stare, eyes flitting down beneath the dark tumble of his hair. Nyx still hated that. He wanted Noctis to look at him, to see him like he saw him in all his stories. He wanted him to watch as he played out all the “anythings” about Nyx that he wanted to know and Nyx never wanted to tell.

“Are you, um,” – Nyx was still horrible with words – “Are you feeling any better? You look better…” _You always look better than anything I’ve ever seen._

They’d both been sick for a few days. When Nyx was still hoping to front the blame for their argument, he’d thought that he could put it on the bacteria, too. They were gross and they were grumpy and they’d been cooped up trying to recover for too long. And maybe that hot pepper soup was just the spark at the end of an aggravating week of illness.

But no. He couldn’t hide behind stupid excuses anymore.

“I’m okay,” Noctis said in a small voice.

It was only a half-truth. Nyx knew that, while he’d stopped sneezing too, he’d only been heart-sick for Noctis in the head-cold’s place.

“I just… um,” Noctis struggled with his words, hands clasped around the handle of the door. As much to keep Nyx from coming out as to keep himself from going in. “I needed to come back, and say…”

“You don’t have to say you’re sorry.”

“Don’t I?”

His lips pursed and his brow creased and his knuckles strained beneath the leather of his gloves, holding the words back as hard as he knew he needed to say them. Nyx didn’t like that, either. He didn’t like it when Noctis tried to censor himself, when he thought he needed to edit out the miscreant verses of his honesty. He looked so cold out there, too. Nyx wanted nothing more than to let him inside, but he was terrified that he wouldn’t come in if he opened that door.

“I mean,” Noctis said, talking to the glass between them. “How can I blame you for not telling me anything about you when I barely know anything about myself? I have a job that I thought I always wanted, and yet I feel like I’ve never belonged there. And now I’m acting like such a…” He trailed off and shook his head, refocusing his words and turning his eyes up, fearfully, to meet Nyx’s. “All this time I’ve been so afraid of losing you, that I went ahead and did just that.”

“I’m right here, Noct. All of me. Anything you want to know, just ask and I…”

He’d tell him anything. He’d resolved himself to that. He’d play him every dark and gritty note he wanted, but… Nyx sighed, his own hands an inversed reflection to Noct’s where they clenched the bar to the door. Noct’s hands were smooth and elegant and ink-stained beneath those gloves. Nyx’s were calloused and scarred and rough with age, and he was always scared that he was going to cut Noctis on all of his sharp edges when he touched him.

“You said that you were afraid? Well, that makes two of us.”

He was so afraid of scaring him away. He liked playing his hero. He didn’t want to turn into the monster lurking between the pages of a horror story. He didn’t want to be the embittered antihero on the silver screen, lauded for his gruffness and all the scars that made him that way. He just wanted his edges to stay soft enough for Noctis to hold.

Nyx reached up to touch the glass separating his hand from Noct’s face, running the edge of his thumb along the frame of his hair, pretending that he could part it to better see his eyes.

“I want to let you in,” he confessed. “But I don’t know how.” _Not without chasing you away._

Noctis drew in a breath and let it out, the cold cloud of it fogging the glass between them. He reached up to match his fingertips to Nyx’s and pulled on a smile.

“Well, the door says ‘push to open’…” Nyx laughed, as hesitant and hopeful with it as Noctis was with his teasing, adding a gentle tug of, “Oh, you mean emotionally” while Nyx recovered himself.

It wasn’t yet a solution, and it was still as terrifying as a snapped guitar string at center stage, but it was still the start of a new melody. One that Nyx was determined to play right. All new pieces came with their challenges. If he was just as brave as Noctis was, maybe they could both make it their masterpiece.

“It’s really cold out here,” Noctis said then, pressing his hands to the door. He looked up at Nyx, the fractal reflections of snow in his eyes trembling with his nerves as he asked, “Think that you can let me in?”

“Yeah,” Nyx said, pulling open the door. “Please. Come inside.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> filled for a prompt over [here~](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/171940628287/prompt-maybe-1920s-i-want-to-let-you-in-but)


	10. prologues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyx writes the first lines for telling Noct his story.

He kissed him because he missed him, and because habit dictated that he should. Logic promptly reminded him that he shouldn’t – not just yet – not given the circumstances. He hadn’t earned back that right.

But one, brief habit of affection quickly turned into darkened eyes and hastened steps and pressing Noct’s back to his door when they got upstairs. A rapid crescendo of shared breaths and needy touches and rushing through clothes to lay each other bare, and Nyx was dropping Noctis back into his bed and reclaiming his voice between each sharp beat of body drummed against body.

Words had never come nearly as easy to Nyx as sound like this did. The quickening cadence of Noct’s low cries steadied his rhythm, wrote him a tempo, and opened him up a measure to inscribe every note he wanted to sing into his sweet, soft skin. When they were both at a loss for words, on the days like this where Noct’s poetry ran dry and Nyx’s lyrics fell out of tune, they needed to _feel_ what they couldn’t say.

Every little fear, they could just let spill onto the sheets without a single word to form them. They could just drive them all away with pure sound, never giving those doubts the strength of an identity, not a single syllable uttered to give all those silent terrors a name. Just sweet, wordless symmetry; the only vocals, an instrument without any verse. Just their own names, made real between them.

“I missed you,” Nyx murmured in the afterglow.

Noctis chuckled, the roughened chords of his voice sending a pleased, possessive shiver down Nyx’s spine because _he’d_ made that sound in him. That was _his_ hymn scrawled in the undertone of Noct’s laugh, his pleasure harmonized with the dark aria of his muse’s beautiful voice.

“I was only gone a day, Nyx.”

“Still…”

Nyx burrowed his face within the soft hair at the nape of Noct’s neck, squeezing his back to his chest and blanketing as much of his body with his own as he could. Snow freckled the windowpane, the fire escape outside rattling with the midwinter winds. The draft was a crisp reminder at his back of the fears Nyx hadn’t let himself say in the rhythm of their love-making. That all he had to give just wouldn’t be enough to keep Noctis tucked beside him like this. That all he’d done up to this point – the pains he’d suffered, the hurts he’d wrought, the scars that still marked each one – wouldn’t be worth it if he wasn’t good enough for Noct.

They’d folded their fears into the sheets. He supposed that, while he was fearless, now was as good a time as any to ask.

“What do you want to know, Noct?”

The quiet was still terrifying. Nyx held him a little tighter, like a child with a stuffed toy, hoping for a lullaby in the midst of a thunderstorm. Noctis was kind enough to start off soft.

“Where are you from?”

“Nowhere. Literally. Galahd is just a bunch of little islands way off the coast of here, right in the middle of the ocean.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s, um…”

_Poor_ , would have been the truest thing to say. _Beautiful_ , would have been truer, but it was hard to tell people raised in a city of silver and gold that the sparkle off its spires could not compare to the glitter of the sea. Thatched roofs and dirt roads weren’t nearly as glamorous compared to the country estates and the penthouse suites of the upper-class. It had been a humble existence, earning his keep and saving for his dreams of being a musician in the big city.

But it was nothing compared to the gilded frivolity of Insomnia. At least, that’s what people used to say. It had hurt, the first few years. It made him angry – got him into trouble a time or two – but after a while, he stopped caring. Especially once he’d found people that didn’t scorn him for his braids before they applauded him for his music. Kingsglaive had made him feel like he belonged, and that was enough for him. People heard the beauty in his songs, and he didn’t have to convince them of the beauty in his nation.

Noctis shifted beneath him, swiveling around in the circle of Nyx’s arms to face him. “An island, you said?” he coaxed. “Did you live by the sea?”

His eyes reminded him of the sea. And they reminded Nyx that it was Noctis he was talking to about home. Noctis who saw the beauty in everything, from the elegant alleys of Altissia, down to the stained keys of Nyx’s piano. He came from a life of privilege, yet he dove straight into the slums and didn’t come out cringing.

“Yeah,” Nyx said, breathing out the knots of old anxiety that he couldn’t quite shake. “It was about a twenty minute walk to the nearest beach.”

“Did you fish?”

“Sometimes. Didn’t have the patience for it much when I was younger. I’d swim, mostly. I’d race my friends out to the rocks and dive off of cliffs and scare all the adults into thinking we would break our necks or drown.”

Noctis smiled, loose and lazy and pillowing his head on his hands as he listened. He didn’t ask for too much – just the little things, to start – and Nyx didn’t tell more than he felt he needed to. He knew that the questions would get harder one day. He could see where Noct’s eyes defaulted when they got too heavy, lingering on the scars against his chest before lifting them back up to watch him talk. Nyx was still afraid of those questions. But Noctis was gentle with those fears, strumming a hand through Nyx’s hair when he was finished talking about home.

“That wasn’t so bad, right?”

“Nothing with you is bad,” Nyx said, reaching up to wrap his hand in his and turning his face in to kiss his palm. He lingered, tracing the lines and the faint stains of ink on his fingertips, wondering if he would like the story he was asking Nyx to write for him. “I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes I feel like there’s been a bit of a mistake. I’m not all that special, and you’re…”

“Here to help you.”

“You’re amazing.”

Noctis blushed, as if it was the first time Nyx had ever afforded him such reverent admiration. It reminded him of the first night he’d ever played for him. Just for him. A song meant only for his ears. The most beautiful song he’d ever written for the most beautiful thing that ever walked into his life.

He was even more beautiful for wanting to see the ugly parts, too. He was braver than Nyx, kinder to him than society bid he should be, and his boundless understanding almost scared Nyx as much as telling his own past did. He was just a shadow at the fringes of his light. Sometimes he was afraid he would burn up in it, he wanted to get so close.

“You _are_ special,” Noctis whispered, just between the two of them and the snowflakes on the windowsill. “You and your music. And not just to me.”

“You’re the only audience I’ll ever need.”

Noctis snorted like he wanted to argue Nyx’s greatness for all the world to hear, but he yawned and had to retire that tirade to the pillows. He pushed his face against Nyx’s chest and settled deeper beneath the covers.

“Will you tell me more about home in the morning? It doesn’t have to be a lot.”

“Yeah. A little bit.”

“Good.”

It was good, Nyx realized, as he lay in the quiet after Noctis had fallen asleep. They hadn’t gotten to the worst parts yet, but he could see the notes forming in the dark corners of his apartment. And they weren’t so bad. Not with his little flame of light beside him to brighten them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> filled for a prompt over [here](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/171975070707/1920s-prompt-theres-been-a-bit-of-a)


	11. nonfiction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyx tells Noctis a story.

“How did this happen?”

He knew that it was coming. He knew that it had all been leading up to this. And he knew that he was finally ready to answer.

Noctis was patient with him; as steady as a drum beat, keeping time through a symphony. He started small and slowly worked his way up, like he was working through the first arc of one of his stories. Tiny questions to plant the seeds of a larger plot, carefully cultivating each answer until the buds of a bigger bloom started to show.

He didn’t force any issue, didn’t rush Nyx through a line of questioning that they both knew he wasn’t ready to walk along. It was an easy ebb and flow, the two of them revising their rhythm through slow, soulful sessions. For each small answer Nyx gave – where he was born, how his family was, how he met his friends – Noctis traded him a question of equal value he could pose to him.

There was a lot to learn. Some of it mattered, some of it didn’t, but it was all important. All of it made Nyx fall just a little more in love with Noctis. He hoped that the exchange was mutual.

When they started getting into the harder questions, there was always one small note of fear playing long and low in the back of Nyx’s head. He knew that it had no reason to be there. He knew that there was no place for it in their duet. He knew that Noctis was fair and kind, and that he read every story for all the good _and_ the bad. He knew that this one ugly note was only inside his head, but he still had a long way to go before he could harmonize it with all the rest.

The latest question – perhaps, even the final question – was about the scar. The big one. The awful, spidery veins coursing across his chest to write out the reminder of the worst part of him. Noctis had wanted to ask him about it the first night he saw it. Not because he was repulsed by it or afraid of it, Nyx knew. He just wanted to understand it.

They’d been kissing for a while. Often, Noctis coaxed along his questions with kisses. It comforted Nyx, having him so close when he talked about the parts of himself that frightened him more than they did anyone else. Kissing Noct reminded Nyx to trust. If Noctis could trust him with taking care through the most intimate, physical acts of their love, Nyx could trust him to take care with the sharp pieces still poking through his heart.

The club was closed for the evening, the night halfway to dawn by the time the city’s daylight runaways tired of their reveling. They had the place to themselves, Nyx entrusted with locking the place up when he was ready to head home. At the rate he was going with Noctis, molded to his lap on the split-seamed office chair, Nyx didn’t think he would ever be ready.

Noctis had loosed the top three buttons of Nyx’s shirt, washing kisses along his throat as Nyx tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling as if he could see through it straight to the heavens. Noct’s careful hands had slipped inside his shirt, his touch as delicate as kitten whiskers when he brushed over the scar. He’d gradually slowed his romantic assault, and Nyx knew that the question was on the tip of Noct’s lips before he’d even formed it.

Nyx had half a mind to just toss Noctis back onto the desk and kiss him so senseless he forgot how to speak at all. It was certainly easier than having to tell him the truth. But they’d been working up to this. They’d been working hard together, Noctis there with him through it all. He wanted to know it all, and Nyx had promised himself that he would tell him.

Noct’s palm rested against his chest, thumbing idly against the jagged skin, his other hand stroking along the cut of Nyx’s hair. Nyx pulled in a breath, one, long, deep exhale like the ones he took before every show.

“The whole aspiring-but-penniless musician gig wasn’t exactly paying rent when I first got here,” Nyx started, taking the memories in slow, sober strides. “Had to get real work and couldn’t be picky about it. Not when the city wasn’t keen on sharing wages with a bunch of islanders coming in to muddy up all the sparkle and shine. I, uh… fell into this fighting ring. Not nearly as glorious as the boxing they show on the screens. I hated it, but I was good at it. Winnings were better.

‘It was all run by this guy that everyone was too afraid to stand up to. You know the type. Should have been in jail all his life, not fixing fights underneath the bridge. One night, I guess this fighter was coming in that the guy wanted dead. Big pay raise if I made it look like an accident. The boss didn’t like where I told him to shove it, so…”

“He did this to you?” Noctis said, horrified. “Just for saying no?”

Nyx shrugged, staring down at his hands, fingering the loose belt-loops of Noct’s pants. Insomnia had looked like utopia, glimmering like golden starlight on top of the sea when they’d sailed towards it. He’d quickly learned that all that shimmer was polished with the spit of rich criminals holding it up from the shadows. There was a toll for entering the silver city. He’d spent a long time paying it.

He’d hurt people and been hurt by people in ways he didn’t think people _could_ hurt each other. The underbelly of Insomnia was black with the worst scourge of people he’d ever seen. For too long, he’d thought he would never be able to pull himself back out of the muck.

“In a way, it was a favor,” Nyx laughed, harshly. “You wouldn’t think it by looking at it, but this messed up my arm too bad to fight, even if he wanted me to kill for him again. Got kicked out of there pretty fast after they realized that.”

Noctis pursed his lips together and refused to comment. Nyx had a feeling he knew what he would say. That no pain like his was ever a blessing. That nobody deserved to be hurt like that. Nyx couldn’t tell him that it had felt like penance. He knew that Noct would drive them both mad trying to convince him it wasn’t.

“Lucky for me, this place opened up.” Nyx looked around at the messy office; a calendar marked with throwing darts, crates full of defective gin, ashtray full of dead cigars. “Still not on the right side of the law, and the Commander can be the boss from hell, but… don’t think I could have asked for better.”

Kingsglaive was hardly the grand stand of the music scene he’d imagined, but it was right for him. It was dark and derelict and it salvaged so many wayward souls looking for more than a city of gold. People who were looking for something real, looking for a place to _feel real_ , that was what Kingsglaive was. It took people for what they were: flawed. It didn’t try to erase them or shame them for their vices. It wasn’t the pretty colors of the city overhead, but the smudgy dark jazz floor matched them all much better.

Some days, it was harder to be content with that than others. Especially on days where he held Noctis in his arms like this, and looked into his eyes, such a startling shade of blue. They shined like his dreams, perfect and untouchable.

“I’m a mess, Noct,” he confessed, his voice hoarse with the unbearable weight of just how wrong he was to ruin him with his chaos.

Noctis frowned and cupped his face and forced him to look into his perfect eyes. They were full of conviction and compassion, as turbulent as the seas Nyx still remembered from his youth.

“Yes, you are,” Noctis said. “But you’re my mess. You’re a complication of perfect imperfections and I love it. I love _you_. You know that I do. I love that you’re messy because I know that you’re _real._ You don’t have to hide that from me. I wouldn’t love you this much if you tried to be anything less than who you are.”

How did he find him down here? How did the world keep giving him these chances? First Kingsglaive, now Noctis; why did the universe keep putting so many gifts in his path? He didn’t deserve them. He was wretched and wrecked, been wrong and wronged. He’d made so many mistakes that should have put him six feet deep under the city and its underworld. But something, somewhere, thought he deserved deliverance. Well, his mother always said it was rude to refuse a gift.

“Kay,” Nyx said, small and smiling. “Can’t argue with the words of a writer.”

Noctis snorted. “Clearly you’ve never met my critics.”

Gods, if only they knew him like Nyx knew him. If only the whole world knew how perfect Noctis really was to him. He’d just have to keep writing songs to change their minds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written by request of LogicDive over [here](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/172977580317/prompt-for-1920s-nyxnoct-it-just-screamed-cute)


	12. duet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A small surprise waits for Noctis after work.

“C’mon, Your Highness. Up and at ‘em. You know you’re not gettin’ paid overtime for this.”

Dino batted at his shoulder, forcing Noctis to blink and shutter the film of fog from his eyes. Lines of ink that he hadn’t realized he’d stopped seeing came into focus, the white page beneath them coming back over-bright, and leaving dark, square imprints beneath his eyelids.

He hadn’t noticed how late it was. Nor how long he’d sat there typing – though the scream in his back was all too eager to remind him when he lifted his arms to stretch. The office was nearly empty, blinders coming down on the doors and lights dimming dark. The last of his colleagues were rushing into their coats and hats, snapping shut the clasps of leather briefcases and shuffling half-done drafts of papers into desk drawers. The weekend awaited, a welcome reprieve from long days of strained eyes and clustered thoughts crowding to get onto the page.

Noctis hadn’t felt so drained in a long time. He pulled the last page of his work-loaded week from the typewriter. The emptiness he felt once he finally stopped typing was, at last, a salvation, instead of a crucifixion.

Words had been falling a little less heavily, lately. Instead of crashing onto the page and leaving messy impact stains for him to scrub and struggle to shape into sentences, they’d been alighting more gently to the paper. The words gave him time to coax the next one to come after, a clean stream of characters coming together in coherent lines of fact and prose and wit and generally decent literacy.

The inside of his skull felt airy and fresh. He leaned back in his chair, letting his shoulder-blades sink lower down his back, unfettered by the collision of stresses that had bunched them up beneath his ears for weeks. He was finally caught up, his backlog of unfinished articles and looming deadlines cleared. All the clutter of his commitments had sloughed off his shoulders and onto the pages, and for the first time in a long time, he felt like he could breathe.

“Plans this weekend, Caelum?” Dino asked in the hall, locking up the office once he’d seen everyone out.

“Nothing in particular.”

“Son of the most important man in Insomnia, and he’s got nothing in particular planned. And here I thought rich politicians had such scandalous and exciting lives.”

Noctis merely smiled, which he was certain only made Dino even more exasperatedly curious about his private pastimes. He was a reporter down to the marrow in his bones in that way.

The things that he got up to with Nyx in his apartment were rarely, if ever, planned – and they were and always would remain _private_ , insatiable curiosity be damned. Though the location was a constant, the activities could range from innocent expressions of songwriting to more indulgent acts of artistry in Nyx’s bed. They might experiment in the kitchen, or Nyx might teach him how to dance, or they might sit out on the fire escape and look at the stars between the skyscrapers.

Or they might just talk. Hardly exciting from an outsider’s perspective, but the stories they’d been sharing lately in the safety of Nyx’s little water-stained apartment were just as thrilling to Noctis as any headline.

He’d learned a lot about Nyx since winter had started to close. While he didn’t demand that he tell him _all_ of his secrets, or ask for one without giving another of his own in return, Noctis felt like he knew Nyx better since these exchanges began. It secured him, comforted him to stop thinking that there was room to doubt. The deeper they went, the safer Noctis felt. It brought him further away from his fears, reminded him that the two of them were more than a silver screen romance.

That they were real, and that they were lasting, and that what they had wasn’t a scripted fiction bound for bitterness. They were better than that. And Noctis always did really know that, but the past few months spent stuck inside his own head had drowned that instinct beneath the depths of his anxiety. Never failed to sabotage him at the best moments in his life.

Though knowing Nyx from the inside-out helped both of them see a little clearer, it didn’t help Noctis predict him. Seeing him leaning against the lamppost across the street when he stepped out onto the sidewalk was as much of a surprise to him as the night Nyx had materialized on Altissia’s cobblestones outside of his hotel room.

“Nyx? What are you doing here?”

He waited until Dino was well gone between the alleys, distracted with a cigar stubbornly refusing to light. Noctis could barely keep himself from bolting across the street to meet Nyx once they were alone, his airy thoughts bubbling over in delight at the sight of him. Nyx never picked him up after work. As Noct’s shift was ending, Nyx’s was usually starting, and they met down in Kingsglaive to wile the rest of the night away.

Nyx smiled when he saw him. His hat was in his hands, feeding the brim between his palms in a nervous circle. Noct’s delight instantly simmered down to concern. Nyx wasn’t usually so fidgety.

“Is everything okay?”

“What? Yeah, of course,” Nyx said, genuinely confused by the question. “I just, um, couldn’t wait to see you.” He shrugged, face dipping down with a small, sheepish smile. “Sorry, I probably shouldn’t bother you at work.”

“Work’s over, Nyx,” Noctis chuckled, reaching forward to still Nyx’s nervous hands. “And it’s not like I never bother you at yours.”

“You call that bothering?”

Nyx smiled, looping his fingers through Noct’s. He needed to give them something to hold, a song to play, lest they play upon his nerves instead. Noctis squeezed his hands, scrutinizing Nyx’s face for any indicators of his distress. Something was on his mind, though nothing serious, Noctis guessed. Nyx’s smiles still came easy and his eyes were as bright as forked lightning behind two storm-clouds.

“Shall I come not bother you at work now, then?” Noctis asked, nodding down the street to where Kingsglaive waited, burrowed beneath the sidewalks.

“Actually, I took the night off,” Nyx said, sliding his hand along Noct’s arm to draw him deeper into his space. “Just really in the mood to spend time with you.”

Noctis felt his chest flutter when it touched against Nyx’s. He felt his knees weaken beneath the quiet adoration cushioning Nyx’s eyes. Noctis swallowed the litany of words ushering themselves into his brain to try and tell him how much it meant to him to really be seen like that. Instead, he pulled on a smile, because sometimes no words at all were necessary to tell Nyx just how much he loved him.

“Okay. Let’s go home…”

Nyx’s smile deepened, his head tilting to the side like he knew something Noctis didn’t.

“Home?”

Noctis blinked, stalling over the elaboration. His cheeks warmed and his heart thumped when he realized the implication.

“I… I mean your place.”

Most days, Noctis forgot that Nyx’s apartment was just that: _Nyx’s_ apartment. For as long as they’d been together, Noctis had been a frequent visitor to the small sanctuary overlooking the streets. And as much as the two of them had been talking about themselves, they hadn’t really talked about _them_.

“That’s actually what I really wanted to see you about, Noct,” Nyx said, reading the embarrassment on Noctis’s face like he’d spoken his thoughts out loud.

Nyx looped an arm around his waist, bumping his hip against Noct’s as he invited him to walk alongside him. The day was fading between the concrete titans of Insomnia, long shadows winding back against the russet light of the sunset. Nyx put his hat back on his head to shade his eyes from the sun. As he sunk the brim down, Noctis saw his cheek crease like he was biting the inside.

“We’ve been a ‘we’ for a while now. And we’ve been so good and so long at it that, I guess the usual things you should remember to ask your man just kind of slipped my mind because they seemed to obvious. You’re there so much, it never occurred to me that I should ask you to move in. Feels like you live there already.”

Noctis caught the nervous flicker of his eyes beneath his hat, trying to catch a glimpse of Noct’s reaction. As much as Noctis had his own fears to contend with, he knew Nyx had just as many. They each had their insecurities, their anxieties, things that should be so simple yet felt like so much more. Noctis could never hold Nyx’s against him. He knew Nyx didn’t hold them against him.

Noctis sunk himself against Nyx’s side, pulling Nyx’s arm tighter around his waist. “I’m yours if you want me.”

“Now that I know we don’t have to ask.”

Nyx stopped walking to tug Noctis against him. Kisses were always seals of a promise with them. In moments of doubt, when Noct’s words came out ugly and Nyx’s notes fell out of tune, they stopped, and they kissed, and they silenced one another with the reminder that, for every scrapped song or wasted article, they still had this one masterpiece.


	13. rough drafts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noct's desk is looking better than ever with Nyx reading through it.

Noctis had not wanted to be a writer for _all_ of his life.

When he was a child, he said he’d grow up to be a zoologist, maybe an oceanographer, and travel across the Cygillan to study new species of animals. He used to wear safari hats and crawl through the grass on his hands and knees looking for bugs to doodle in his notebooks. He had journals upon journals of haphazard scribbles, detailing, in six-year-old gibberish, the behaviors he’d observed of the backyard denizens between the numerous properties he’d traveled with his father to on holidays.

He couldn’t remember the exact point of divergence where his interest turned to storytelling. Words had always been a part of his life, from the studious notes he took on his favorite species, to the fairytales his father used to tell him as a kid. Then, there were the words in the press that had closed in on his adolescence from all sides, brandishing a hundred different ideas of the man he was meant to become. He read stories he wasn’t ready for, characters with his name that he didn’t like, plots and ugly prose that he could write better for himself.

It was spite which drew him to journalism; that much he was sure of. A year ago, hunting for stories like a penny dreadful detective had been all he’d wanted to do. He’d set out to prove that he was more than just his name. He’d sought respect for his own accomplishments, not the blood he shared with his father and those same accomplishments he was expected to inherit as if they were a genetic code. He’d wanted to be different, do what he loved, and pursue the things that made _him_ happy, not the papers.

He’d done that and more in a year, but he wasn’t so certain that journalism was what he truly loved. The facts and figures of Insomnia held no mystique for him, the nonfiction of the day-to-day, so far from the thrilling espionages of the dime store novels he collected on his way home from work.

One downside to moving in with Nyx was that he had less space for said collection. There was less space for a lot of things, and while it was a jarring adjustment to make at first, he was learning to make the most of it. Especially when the close quarters had him constantly colliding with Nyx’s bare chest, beaded with water straight from the shower.

“We’ve got to stop bumping into each other like this,” Nyx teased, catching him around the waist with a towel.

“Ugh, come on, Nyx! You’re soaked.”

Noctis tried to make a show of being disgusted by the dampness seeping into his nice, dry shirt, but he couldn’t pull together a straight face for the first word. Nyx gathered him close and pressed his wet body all over him, laughing in his ear as Noctis squirmed and struggled to escape his moist capture. Though it was hard to protest when he felt his face pulling in like a magnet to burrow against Nyx’s neck, breathing in the smell of his aftershave.

“This living situation is not going to work out,” Noctis warned him. “You’re far too distracting to the creative process.”

“I think you mean that I’m far too _inspiring._ ”

Distracting. Definitely distracting, with his warm, wet kisses skirting along Noct’s jaw like his fingers danced along the piano keys. It would be a miracle of the muses if he wrote a single word for the rest of his life at the rate he was going. Merely a week into living with Nyx, and Noctis had found every excuse not to sit down and write – the biggest excuse being that he wrote for work all day anyway.

When he came home – home _to Nyx_ now – all he wanted to do with the rest of his night was relish in that fact. Simple moments, just like this one. Catching him out of the shower, bumping hips in the kitchen, ducking underneath the clothes line, unlocking the apartment door to the careful test of guitar chords in the settling gloom of the evening. It was hard not to spend his nights just sprawled against the fire escape window and admiring their tiny picture of domesticity.

“Inspire me from afar, then,” Noctis giggled against the roving tickle of Nyx’s scruff. “There’s still some things I want to do tonight.”

“Can I be one of those things?”

Noctis undid himself from Nyx’s relenting towel trap, fleeing to the sanctuary of his writing desk that they’d somehow managed to smash into the corner. While it couldn’t protect him from Nyx’s bent grin, nor derail his own eyes from following the axis of his hips, the desk managed to deter them each from the beckoning call of the empty bed.

“What’s this?” Nyx asked later, long after infuriating Noctis with the agonizing pull of his shirt over his abs and the click of his belt through the loops of his pants.

He brought coffee as consolation, trading a space for it on the desk by shifting a few frayed sheets of paper to the side. The many crossed-out lines and bullied script, surrounded by scraped circles scraped of approval, caught his attention as much as they were intended to catch Noct’s when he looked back on them.

“Oh… That. Just, um… Nothing.”

Nyx arched a brow at him, the faint scar above it a wry smile as he raked his eyes over the pages. Noctis’s first instinct was to whisk them out from under intruding eyes and stuff them into his desk where their foolishness could never see the light of day. And maybe, if he was lucky enough himself, he would forget all about the bull-headed idea.

But Nyx was gentle with his words as he slid through the pages, a small smile growing ever less small as he read through them.

“You’re writing a book.”

“I’m _thinking_ about writing a book.”

“You sure?” Nyx lifted his neurotic scribbling for him to see, in case he forgot what his own hand-writing looked like. “Because this looks a lot like writing to me.”

“Really? Because it looks to me like a ten-year-old took an art class on my good paper.”

Nyx chuckled, returning the collection in a neat little pile to the edge of Noctis’s desk. He leaned his arms against the crowded oak, squatting down to meet his eyes across the vast disarray of ink and paper which had tormented Noctis for the duration of his adulthood.

“How long have you been ‘thinking’ about this book?”

Noctis shrugged, tapping the end of his pen against the desk. The thought of writing a book, a true-to-form _story_ , from the ground up, filled him with as much excitement as it did anxiety. It wouldn’t be like journalism, where he could set himself apart from the facts and merely be a typewriter from which the people could inform their own gossip. Being a novelist would mean plucking seeds straight from his own heart to plant between the paragraphs. As much as it would be fiction, it would be nurtured by more honesty than even the Citadel asked him to put into words. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to share that much of himself with the rest of the world.

Nyx stilled a palm over Noct’s incessant tapping, nudging the pen from his fingers to replace with his own. “You would be so good at it, Noct,” he told him, as fluid as any song he might serenade him with at night. “And you’d be so happy doing it.”

“Don’t think it pays very well,” Noctis snorted, half joking as he turned his hand to better fit in Nyx’s.

“Neither does playing piano in a dingy little speak-easy, but hey, I’ve never smiled more in my life.”

“Dingy?” Noctis laughed. “Don’t let Drautos hear you say that.”

“Won’t be smiling so much then,” Nyx agreed.

They shared a laugh, and they held each other’s hand through the little crests of doubt until the waves passed back into their steady, rhythmic pull. It was merely an idea, Noctis thought. One with all the cards stacked against him. But as he threaded his fingers through Nyx’s, he was reminded of how effortlessly the impossible could be graced. From sailing off to Altissia on a penny and some hope, to rising above his scars to compose love songs every night, Nyx had overcome much scarier things to reach his dreams.

Yes, Noctis did mean that he was inspiring when he told him that he was distracting. But he wasn’t _quite_ ready to let that get to Nyx’s head just yet. Like any good story, it was all about the build-up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompted by [Kai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LogicDive/pseuds/LogicDive), the vintage boys' enabler


	14. onomatopoeia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes a song starts with a single meow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another [prompt](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/176565277242/what-up-its-your-1920s-enabler-ready-for-the) to this vintage collection of ambling happiness

Nyx met the summer storm in a headlong collision when he stepped up from the dry darkness of _Kingsglaive._ He sighed, pulled his coat over his head, and made a run for it – not that expediency would have any mercy on the state of his clothes by the end of his flight.

It looked like it had been pouring for hours by the time his shift ended, and like it would pour for hours more. He hadn’t been too surprised when he climbed from the smoky bowl of dance and jazz to find the silver city glistening and misty under the powerful dregs of rain. He could smell it on the air when he woke up that morning, sneaking into his open window to cover his bare skin in a clamminess that stuck his chest to Noct’s back.

He hadn’t been able to hear it when he was down below in the bar. Between the drum of the piano keys beneath his fingers and the clap of heels on the tiled floors between tables tinkling with glasses and popping with champagne bottles, he was happily deaf to any goings-on in the city above. He wasn’t so happy now that he hadn’t been prepared for the storm to open up without him to negotiate his preparedness.

The rain beat against his head from above the threadbare helm he’d tried to fashion for himself. His old ulster had long since retired from its better uses. He could feel a few slick droplets running down the back of his neck through the worn-out patches of fabric, and as he pressed forward, the storm pressed back, blasting against his unguarded face.

His clothes weighed five extra pounds in the one block it took him to reach home. He gasped into the lobby and swore quietly to himself as he wrung out what he could before tracking the deluge upstairs. It had felt like he’d just swum through a lake, holding his breath so as not to have the water fill up his lungs and sink him down to the asphalt. The rain was a mercy on the sizzling summer, no doubt about it, but damn if it wasn’t relentless. Making up for the length of its absence, he supposed.

The whole apartment building croaked and whined around him as he slopped his way up to his door. It sounded like an army of small children firing toy guns at the walls, ricocheting tiny, biting bullets off the old bricks. It was loud, and Nyx was secretly grateful for that. Maybe he wouldn’t have to hear his neighbors arguing over potatoes for dinner on his left, or hear the old biddy upstairs stomping from one room to the other with a broom in her ongoing war to vanquish every particle of dust that dared to settle on her property.

Hopefully – maybe – if Noct was up for it, their neighbors wouldn’t hear the two of them tonight, either.

Nyx smiled to himself as he fished through his wet pockets for his key, trying the door with the other hand in case Noct had forgotten to lock it again. He had, and Nyx was already thanking the sheets of the storm for their silencing effect while he thought of how he could tease and torture Noct for such an innocuous oversight.

Color him confused to open the door to a Noctis drenched to the toes, nearly as soaked as Nyx was, crouched and cooing by the armchair to a nest of bathroom towels shifting and purring in gracious affection as Noct gently administered pets and rubs and comforting touches.

“Uh, whatcha got there, baby blues?”

Noctis started, not having noticed Nyx had come home. His face broke into a tired smile, haggard features sagging in relief as Nyx quietly closed the door and approached their little house-guest.

“I couldn’t just walk by and leave her,” Noctis explained, nursing the terrycloth towels over dense curls of wet fur. “She was crying and cold and just look at her, I had to help…”

Noctis often overelaborated like this – an occupational hazard, Nyx supposed. He didn’t need to justify himself to Nyx, but he always felt as though he needed to give him a reason for anything he did now that they were living together. Nyx appreciated it, of course, and he would never tell him to shut up and stop talking over the little trivialities of their new arrangements – it already took so much to convince him it was safe to speak his mind, not just write it down.

The cat was an old gray color, not unlike the thinning mop of hair on his upstairs neighbor’s wrinkled head. It was matted and muddy and shedding thick clumps of fur that plastered to the material of the towels as Noctis massaged out the wetness in careful circles. Its paws were black with dirt, one ear torn from some old tussle with another street cat, and even if it wasn’t wet, Nyx was sure he would still see the definition of its ribcage through the fur.

Nyx liked animals – he’d grown up in a farming community, of course he liked animals. He remembered having a dog when he was really young, but no pets after the old mutt fell asleep to greener pastures as Nyx started school. A new baby animal would have been a tad too much for his mother, when she had another baby person on the way.

As Nyx had settled into the city – and been alone for most of it – he’d frequently debated adopting a companion. But between poverty and the untoward circumstances of his first line of work, it hadn’t seemed fair to bring another life into his. And once he settled in this building, those ideas were decided for him.

He didn’t know how to break it to Noctis that the apartment building didn’t allow pets.

“How long have you been home?” he asked instead. “Has it eaten anything? Have you?”

Noctis yawned as if only just realizing the time when Nyx asked after it. He blinked a few times and searched for the clock, shrugging when he could give no accurate answer.

“Usual time off from work,” he said, mouth curling into a smile as the cat bumped its head into his hand when he was distracted from his attention. “Picked her up pretty quick after that. It had just started raining.”

Nyx stalked to the kitchen without another question – it had been raining for a while. They could all use a little warming up and drying off while the storm pummeled the bricks around them.

There was a left-over breast of daggerquil in the refrigerator that Nyx shredded into small pieces for the cat. He prepped two cups of coffee for him and Noct first. He’d make them a pot of soup once they were all dried off.

“Hope you plan on doing the laundry,” Nyx teased from the counter, noting the amount of cat hair on the towels and sticking to Noct’s wet clothes.

“Yes, Nyx, I’ll clean up after her and play with her and make sure she’s fed…” Noctis drawled in the exaggerated fashion of a child pestered by their parent.

“About that…” Nyx bit his lip, forking off slivers of meat into a bowl.

He brought it over to the chair, the stray’s nose instantly activating with interest as Nyx set it on the floor. Noctis carefully helped the cat down, bundled in a towel and a little unsteady on her scrawny legs.  She probed at the food for a minute before stealing tentative mouthfuls and settling next to the bowl to indulge.

“I know,” Noctis sighed before Nyx could elaborate. He sat back against the armchair and watched the cat eat, making sure she didn’t gobble it up too fast or struggle with any of the larger pieces. “No pet apartment.”

“I’m really sorry, Noct.”

“Me too,” Noctis huffed.

They sat and stared as the stray ate, committing a totality of focus to her meal like a soldier on rations. The cackle of the rain sounded crueler than it did when Nyx first walked up the stairs. There must have been a shelter they could take it to – he wouldn’t dream of putting the poor thing back on the streets. They could always put up posters, but without a collar and given the shrewd look in her eye, Nyx doubted she’d had a true home for a very long time, if ever.

“We’ll find a place for her,” Nyx reassured him, reaching across the mess of towels to clasp a hand around Noct’s.

He was surprised when Noctis smiled up at him. “Don’t worry. I already know where she’s going.”

* * *

“I am uniquely unqualified for taking care of a cat, Noctis.”

“Come on, you took care of me! This should be a walk in the park for you by comparison.”

Ignis sighed, withering under Noct’s desperate blue eyes quicker than Nyx could pour him a drink. He’d never been to Noct’s old apartment before, and now that he was here, a day later and still with rain streaking the towering windows, he was glad he never had. He would have never let Noctis move in with if he’d known just how good he had it before.

It was a palatial space, high above the city, with all its rooms quartered off like a decent apartment should be instead of cramming it all into one like his. There was a modern stove to cook on, a telephone by the door, a record player in the corner, and a big radio set in front of the couch. It was neat and tidy and full of all the amenities of life that Nyx would never be able to afford. His pittance of an apartment was a poor step down for Noctis.

Nyx swallowed down the guilt with the shot of bourbon he’d originally poured for Ignis to cope with Noct’s puppy dog eyes. The man was a little more dangerous than Nyx realized, having this stuff displayed so brazenly on top of his refrigerator. He always figured Ignis as a law-abiding and insurmountably innocent citizen of Insomnia. Guess friends of the mayor’s son got a free pass on prohibition.

“A human being is a far cry from a feline being, Noct,” Ignis insisted, taking the new glass Nyx offered him the second it was within his periphery.

“It’ll be easy for you,” Noctis pleaded, holding the stray in his lap as he talked. “She’s not nearly as picky as me.”

She’d puffed up to her regular size since Noctis had spent the night cleaning her up for Iggy’s assessment. Her fur was dark gray as the storm clouds outside, her eyes yellow, though a little murky in one. She had a fluffy tail and a face like a coeurl, but a purr like a motorboat and the discipline of a sea captain to go with it – though there was still something a little wily in the hook of her claws holding onto Noct’s knee.

Ignis glared at her and glared at Noct and glared at Nyx and glared at everything. He knew he was defeated long before Noctis had even opened his mouth. He knew the second he answered the door and Noctis had an uncollared cat wrapped up in his arms and an imploring look in his eyes. He knew that there was no denying his friend anything he asked for, and for such an unselfish request… How could he possibly refuse?

“I work all day, Noctis,” Ignis continued to try, making a sharp gesture to bring him the mangy creature.

“Cats are self-sufficient animals,” Noctis told him, already beaming as he coaxed the cat over for Iggy’s inspection.

“I can’t afford the visit to the veterinarian should she need shots.” Ignis held out a fist for the animal to sniff at – a gesture of greeting, Nyx noted, that only a person who definitely had a cat once in his life would know.

“I’ll pay for everything, Iggy.”

“The collar, the litter, the pounds of food she’ll consume per year…”

“Done.”

Ignis sighed through his nose, slowly turning his hand for the cat to continue investigating. “I suppose I do have the space since you moved out.”

“You know I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving you all alone, Specs.”

Ignis crooked up a smile at that, a note of melancholy coloring the chords of his neck as he swallowed his drink. Nyx stationed himself by the window, hands in his pockets as if he could retreat into his coat from the glare of this shiny, upscale apartment and the empty spaces he’d stolen Noctis from.

He hoped that Ignis wouldn’t see it as an insult – a pet substituting for a person. He hoped he wouldn’t take it as mockery, as Nyx rubbing it in his face that he had Noctis to himself now, though he had never intended to steal him away from all of this. Steal him away, definitely, to music and rogue adventures and carnivals that swept into town every summer. But not from his comfortable life in this castle tower above his kingdom.

Noctis never once complained though. And Nyx didn’t detect any resentment in Ignis’ shoulders as he traded progressively relenting barbs with Noctis over the animal’s future care.

The cat finished assessing Iggy’s scent and lifted her chin for him to tentatively scratch underneath. She was oddly friendly for a stray, and curious where Nyx had expected her to be wary. Maybe she really was sick, and they were asking more of Ignis than even they knew.

Or maybe, he wondered, as the animal was released from Noct’s arms to inspect the corners of her new dominion, followed by Iggy’s intuitive stare, already plotting out the placement of her new furnishings, it was just fate.


	15. symphony

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their lives have been in harmony since the first serenade. Now, they'll be a symphony for the rest of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very, very happy birthday to LogicDive! I know this is your favorite AU of mine - thank you for enabling it for so long! - and I hope this chapter makes your birthday feel extra special, just like these boys! <3
> 
> Note: The song lyrics used are from a piece that's been my background theme for writing this story for a long time! It's [Quiet Nights and Quiet Stars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICX-1VGvUpY) as performed by Stacey Kent, with a little addendum of my own in the final verse for character purposes. Enjoy!

“What is that you’re working on?”

Nyx smiled, not taking his eyes off the notes he was transcribing to the page. The last chord from his guitar still buzzed around the room, teasing the secret to its song just at the tip of Noct’s ears. Like the tickle of a chocobo feather, when Prompto pranked him awake from overworked comas at his office desk.

“You’ll know when it’s done,” Nyx promised, ever the master of delayed gratification.

It’s hard to keep a secret between two adult men living in an apartment the size of a cardboard box. Let alone between two _artists_ , who – by the very nature of their crafts – were creative-bound to seek out and subvert those very secrets.

Whether they be secrets of the truth, of the world, or of the soul; of the wood varnish on a writing desk or the coffee stains on sheet music; whether they be of the profound or the mundane, no small detail was too insignificant to pique their curiosity. No aspect of an ordinary object was left neglected by the over-thought poetry of song and prose. No riddle of the human heart escaped puzzlement – was allowed to shutter itself away in its sunless tomb, to be left undiscovered by an indifferent world too self-absorbed, too hurried, too fearful to stop, and look, and wonder, _what is that?_

Noctis had been asking that question for little over a month now. And – for once – not in a publishable capacity. Merely curiosity for curiosity’s sake.

“When’ll it be done?” he asked, scooting his chair a little closer. The soft scrape of the old wooden legs ground against the floor, earning him the cross-room glare of “the Commander” for endangering the polished lacquer with his carelessness.

“When it’s ready,” Nyx said, only raising his eyes to give Drautos a placating look over Noct’s shoulder, entreating him _not_ to drop his boyfriend in the harbor with brand new shoes of fashionable concrete. “You know the creative process can’t be rushed.”

Noctis huffed, feigning impatience, but asked no more because yes, he was all too familiar with the fickleness of creativity when put on a timetable. Instead, he tucked a smile between his arms, and watched Nyx work from the back of his chair. He should be working, himself – evenings with nothing to do but write were a rare commodity nowadays, what with the harried autumn tumult of city life constantly breaking some sort of news or other – but it was difficult to negotiate staring at a blank page when he could be staring at Nyx instead.

Envying his work ethic – how the notes just seemed to march themselves from his lips, pre-written – moving wordlessly around the smoke rings floating through the bar, tongue wetting the rough, dry edges of his mouth and driving Noctis to wanton fascination with no effort whatsoever. So unforced and organic and full of easy grace, as if he were a mouthpiece for the muses, rather than an acolyte begging for their blessing.

Admiring the subtleties of tension beneath his flesh – the glide of his arms around his guitar, sleeves pulled taut between the dense flex of muscles meeting at the elbow, tawny skin caressing the neck of his instrument as gently as if it were Noct’s own. Long, inked fingers stroked the strings, coaxing that secret song from its throat with the clever, calloused workings of his hands. Those hands could call the quietest voice to come at his touch, keening chords of impassioned music lilting through their apartment on sensual, phantasmal echoes.

Noctis craved him to distraction. He was in love with him and in lust with him, and the savagery of his affection for him was almost startling some days. The simplest actions – the most subdued, ordinary, unnoticed secrets of every day existence – reminded him of how far they’d come and how grateful he was for chance encounters over after-hour gins.

But they had a while more to go before they went home and Noctis could express that affection without Drautos firing a champagne hose at him. Even on slow nights at the speak-easy – and if he wanted to test his luck with the proprietor, the hose was _especially_ for slow nights at the speak-easy – Nyx’s serenades were coveted to the last second of closing time. Even the unfinished strums of private compositions, just to bide the silence of time.

“Noct,” Nyx drawled, plucking the strings in absent amusement. “There’s a reason audience admission doesn’t come before the song is done.”

“It should. I’d pay a million bucks just to watch you work.”

Nyx finally dragged his eyes up from the incomplete bars, silver stare flashing like thrown nickels in a fountain, holding all the dreams wished for on a coin toss close to the chords of his guitar.

“No charge for my baby blues,” he said. “I’m all the richer just for having your time.”

Noctis dropped a sigh through his nose and held the back of his chair a little bit tighter, just to keep himself from jumping up and throwing his arms around Nyx for being so stupidly flattering and flirtatious and dopey and everything he never knew he wanted until he met him. He restrained himself – for the time being, at least until they went home for the night – if only for the sake of sparing them both the sticky, gross sting of weaponized alcohol in his hair.

“And here I was afraid my time was spent distracting you.”

“Of course it is,” Nyx chuckled, strumming absent notes from the strings. “But is it really a distraction when I find you so inspiring?”

Someone gagged behind them, like a cat hurling up a hairball. When Noctis turned to look, only Crowe was left at the bar, looking wholly, dispassionately invested in her task of polishing out the whiskey glasses before closing. Her eyes were firmly set on the friction between glassware and dishrag, seemingly not paying attention to anything but the mundanity of her task.

Such was the skill of a secret, speak-easy bartender, mastering the fine art of being focused so acutely on one task that the listening ear never seemed open. Nevertheless, Noctis heard the revolted warning and put her eavesdropping out of its misery by moving himself out of earshot. He slid onto the piano bench beside Nyx, closing the conversation behind a curtain of mahogany and cigarette smoke, Nyx’s ashtray weaving lazy, dying smoke curls on the corner.

He could see the whole room from this seat, elevated just a step above the dining tables and dance floor, cluttered in a corner rather than center stage. Noctis always insisted that Nyx was talented enough – and definitely handsome enough – to be worthy of the center spotlight, instead of sitting hidden in the smoky, umber shadows while the patrons laughed and danced and drank under the dim glow of the stage lights. But Nyx always told him that it wasn’t the lights, the applause, or the roses thrown at a singer’s feet that he wanted.

He only wanted to be heard. And the patrons of Kingsglaive, whether they stopped to watch him play, stopped to see his face, or meet his eye across the dark bar to recognize and acknowledge the player behind the piece, always heard him.

“Still a great view,” Noctis mused, recalling the first time Nyx had ever invited him behind the piano.

Nyx responded in kind, eyes affixed to Noctis and warming his skin with the sonorous sound of his voice, all the history of his fondness for Noct since that night raising the words on a choir of memories.

“Not another view like it.”

Noctis smiled, tucking his lower lip beneath his teeth. It was hard not to be honest with Nyx when he looked at him like that. It was hard not to ask, when his eyes were so full of love for him – all encompassing, passionate, saturated love of him. It was hard to keep anything in his mind, hard to keep any tiny secrets of his own. Maybe that just came with the occupation of being a writer, putting words to feelings he couldn’t otherwise voice. Maybe it was just Nyx that nurtured him to safety.

“You never get tired of it?” he asked, unfaltering from a hesitation he usually expected from his verbalized wonderings.

Nyx’s expression did not change, the shade of his eyes only softening with an affection that Noctis had yet to find the limits to. Nyx took his hand in his, kissed the crown of his head, and promised, “Never.”

It was days later before Nyx’s secretive song was finished, and he made good on that promise in rhythm and verse.

He’d worked tirelessly at it, committed to making every single note perfect, every word of the lyrics full of surety, symbolism, simplicity and sweetness. He’d worked slow, ruminating for hours each night on a memory he was intent on recalling through a single word. A full orchestra of their lives together, a crescendo of feeling from who Nyx had been before Noct and who he was now because of him.

It was the most important song he would ever write. Because it was for Noctis and only Noctis. Because after listening to all his sins, all his bad notes, all his grunts and growls and baring his teeth against the ugly, discordant mess of his life before, Noctis deserved a sweeter song. He deserved more than Nyx could ever give him, but still, he wouldn’t settle for less than all that Nyx was – small and unseen and penniless though he was.

He had nothing he could give Noct but his music. No money, no status, no big house, or big gifts.

Not even a ring.

But he prayed – and deep in his heart, he knew he didn’t have to do that much – that his voice would be enough. That with his hand in his on this bright and cold autumn afternoon, his love would be enough.

“As romantic as I’m sure this is supposed to be, you couldn’t pick a warmer day to go for a stroll?” Noctis whined.

“Couldn’t wait another day.”

Nyx grinned, squeezing Noct’s gloved hand in apology for the chill. He hoped to make it worth it. He’d been waiting long enough for the muses to award him the perfection of this song.

His guitar case weighed heavy and earnest on his shoulder, bumping against his back as if it were practicing the beats he’d memorized all by itself. His ever-faithful companion, salvaged from a junk yard and carefully, gently returned its voice after months of determination to bring it back from the dead. If Nyx could get up and sing again after the beatings he took, he would bring this guitar back from the ravages that silenced its voice.

It was a foil for his own soul. A totem of metamorphosis, all the broken pieces and scuffed marks buffing themselves out the longer Nyx survived, grew; became better than the corruptible boy he’d been when he first came to this city. It was a part of him now, this guitar. As vital as his own legs, carrying him down to the Kingsglaive office for a job application. As essential as his own arms, composing sound into song to enchant the rebellious writer to listen for his love.

Evening was bleeding over Insomnia by the time they reached the boardwalk. All the shops were shuttered up tight for the coming winter, padlocked and washed-out and rattling with errant swirls of autumn leaves up and down the wooden walkway. Stars peered weekly from the graying cloud of sky, slate gray and turning lavender with the collapse of the sun down Insomnia Bay.

Their first date had been here, when the carnival was in town. He remembered the smell of smoke in the summer, food frying under striped tents, lights glittering and kids squealing, delighted by games and rides and cheap confections from the brightly painted stalls. He remembered the smell of the sea, the hollow surge of water beneath the pier, the roughness of the barnacles crusting the supports against Noct’s back.

Maybe it hadn’t been the most romantic spot for a first kiss – maybe he should have done what anyone else had done with a prospective sweetheart; ride to the top of the ferris wheel and steal a kiss at sunset. But he’d wanted to take his time, wanted it to be private, didn’t want to be on display for a crowd of strangers and timed by the operator’s cycling of the wheel. Noctis hadn’t seemed to mind. He still remembered the eagerness of his hands in Nyx’s hair, the flush of his body against his, the depth of his want in a single kiss.

The boardwalk was like a skeleton by comparison to that night. But it was quiet, empty, all to themselves. And Nyx could make as much of a lovesick fool of himself as he damn well pleased, without an audience to judge him. This was only for Noct’s ear.

“I promised you a song,” Nyx said, as they reached the end of the walkway.

He guided Noctis to sit on the last bench overlooking the harbor. The unhurried lap of waves snapped quietly beneath the pier, the distant foghorns of unseen ships in the mist haunting across the water. It was quiet – and it was cold – but it was perfect, he hoped. That patient puffs of Noct’s breath above his scarf, didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t seem to mind any of Nyx’s schemes, inconvenient, uncomfortable, impossible though they sometimes seemed.

He wanted to go on adventures with him. He wanted to follow him into the dark reaches of this city without fearing what might be in the shadows. Noctis held his hand and ran alongside him, headlong into the secrets that infatuated them both.

No more secrets now, Nyx thought. This song was the last secret he had left to tell.

“You know I’m no good with words,” Nyx said, lifting the guitar from its ragged old case to tune. “But I gave some lyrics a try for this one so, don’t laugh if it’s too hokey.”

“It’ll be perfect, Nyx.”

“After all the time it took to write it? Yeah, it better be.”

Noctis chuckled in agreement, from one perpetually struggling writer to another. And the sound of his laughter, soft and light as ravens’ feathers on the autumn breeze, gave Nyx all the courage he needed to grip his guitar, brace himself on a breath, and get down on one knee to sing:

“ _Quiet nights of quiet stars_  
_Quiet chords from my guitar_  
 _Floating on the silence that surrounds us_ ”

People said that finding a starting point was the hardest part of any composition. And if his whole life in this city was sheet music, that was certainly true. But the first lyrics had come as easily as Noctis came into his life. Out of nowhere, quietly, drifting like a dream, in and out of the cigar smoke of Kingsglaive’s dark jazz nights.

Noctis smiled now, as real as the pump of Nyx’s own heart in his chest, arms wrapped around his chest as he leaned forward to listen. The smallest shift of motion, as timeless to Nyx now as music itself. Noctis always liked to watch him play. He always liked to sit and listen. And he heard him when it felt like no one else could.  
  
“ _Quiet thoughts and quiet dreams_  
_Quiet walks by quiet streams_  
 _And a window looking on the mountains and the sea_ ”

He wanted to take him back to Altissia. To that city drowning in sunsets, where the air tasted like salt and vanilla, where there was music on every corner, at every hour; love on everyone’s lips, light and laughter and soul in each cobblestone. He wanted to take him back to when they were happiest – if he could even gauge the happiest moment from all the happiness he felt with Noct next to him. Hard to quantify love into a single moment of purest joy, when every day since had felt just as full.

“ _This is where I want to be, here with you so close to me_  
_Until the final flicker of life's ember_  
 _I who was lost and lonely, believing love was only_  
 _A bitter tragic joke”_

Noct’s smile turned somber, but didn’t fall. He heard him. He listened deep and pulled it all into his own heart for safe keeping. Writers searched for all the world’s secrets, after all. And while many were worth telling, worth satisfying that drive for discovery, some were better kept quiet. Some secrets were only Noct’s to keep, entrusted to his hands only to hold, delicately, inside of himself when Nyx didn’t know how to bear it anymore. He hadn’t covered his ears when he told him who he used to be. He hadn’t stopped listening because the song turned ugly. He heard it all as part of the music. As if Nyx were the masterpiece. As if he could ever compare.

Nyx forced himself not to hesitate, steadying his hands around the guitar and breathing between the lines. He anchored himself in Noct’s adoring stare, in those baby blues that had possessed him so completely for so long. Gave his music meaning, his life a purpose, and maybe that was crazy, to commit so much of himself to a single person, maybe he was being a fool. Maybe they both were. But “maybe” had gotten him this far.

_Maybe that bar will like my songs and sign me on. Maybe I can haggle that price for the apartment down. Maybe that newsboy will say yes if I ask him…_

Nyx slowed the tempo.

“ _I’ve found with you_  
_The meaning of existence, baby blues_  
 _Oh my love, please_  
 _Will you let me marry you?_ ”

The last chord lilted up off the sea breeze, the briny tang of the bay staining Nyx’s tongue as he held his breath. Noctis stared, cold lips parting in quiet surprise.

There was so much uncertainty in silence. That was why Nyx needed to fill it with sound, he needed to be _sure_ of something. He needed the patterns of his bars, the tempo of his chords all set into a rhythm. He needed to keep time with something better than the erratic banging of his own heartbeat. He scrambled to fill the quiet with quick, unversed words.

“I don’t have a ring,” he laughed, breathlessly – maybe a little maniacally, if he was being honest. “I don’t know how a wedding could even happen, don’t know if I could even afford it. I don’t know if I can give you a fairytale ending or anything like that, but… I can give you me? All of me, as I am, as you’ve loved for all this time. I know that’s a pretty lousy gift, but it’s all I’ve got to give… if you want me.”

Halfway through his blabbering, Noctis had lifted gloved fingers to his face, delicately framing the shape of his jaw as he talked. Just before the last word, he leaned in and kissed him, a seamless duet of lips humming smoothly into the end of his voice. Nyx heard the lap of the water off the bay harmonizing with the thunder in his pulse, heard the greatest song he could never recreate rise up the back of his head. It purged all the nightmares, all the doubts of his first coming here, all the noisy, awful, self-defeating criticisms from his brain.

“Of course I want you,” Noctis murmured, barely a thread of space between them, lips a rosy pink in the conflict of cold air and hot mouth. “You don’t even need to ask.”

“That’s kinda the rules of proposing,” Nyx chuckled, a rattle of emotions colliding in his throat. “One asks the question, the other…”

“The other says yes.”

As if there was any doubt. Because of all the things Nyx was unsure of in his life, Noctis was not one of them. No one had ever loved him quite the same as he. No one had ever heard the secret verses hidden beneath his words, the songs he couldn’t quite sing for all the world to hear. No one saw his scars between the bars quite like he did, no one made his drafty little apartment feel so warm.

Which reminded him, as he took Noct’s cold fingertips in his, that he’d nearly frozen his lover to death just to ask him to marry him.

“Guess we’ve got some plans to make,” Nyx said, kissing the cool leather gloves. “At home, of course.”

Nyx pulled him to his feet, held him to his chest, and laughed as Noctis peppered his face in quiet, kittenish kisses. He bundled him close and buried his face in his hair, nosing between the deep ebony locks to find that familiar scent of earthy sweetness that was just _Noct_. Noct on his bedsheets, Noct in his lyrics, Noct in his life, for the rest of his life.

“You make me so goddamn happy,” Noctis said, pressing all the conviction of his statement into another kiss.

When Nyx came up for air – and gods, he never wanted to know what breathing was again if Noct would kiss him like that for the rest of their lives, he replied, “You’ll never know how much, baby blues.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kinda want to call this an ending to this story, but I kinda don't because I hate endings and could go on forever if narrative law didn't demand I stop at some point lol I'm gonna mark it as complete for now, but that's not to say I won't revisit this for a potential sequel or maybe even a full reimagining, plotted out instead of going by a prompt by prompt basis. We shall see! In the meantime, thank you all for reading! I hope you enjoyed these sappy, stupid romantics and their love story!


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